It’s not often you see a ballet company dance to music with lyrics, let alone get a stage full of professionally trained ballet dancers gleefully shouting “Giddy up!” at you, the audience, but that’s exactly what you will find in Houston Ballet’s crowd-pleasing, season-ending program Sparrow: A Triple Bill.
Like the best mixed repertory programs, this triple bill showcases the rangy versatility of the form as well as the company with three very different works: Ben Stevenson’s Four Last Songs, George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations, and the piece that lends the program its name, Stanton Welch’s Sparrow, set to six songs by Simon & Garfunkel.
Sparrow made its debut back in 2022, and it opens on a seemingly ominous note, the curtain rising to reveal a dark, smoky stage with dancers staring out toward the audience. But the haze under Lisa J. Pinkham’s harsh lighting gives way to something else entirely. It signals a step into another place and time, somewhere warm and familiar and made immediately apparent by the recognizable, playful beat that undergirds Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecilia” and the turtlenecks and bell-bottoms worn by the dancers, each neck to ankle in earthy tones that emphasize the piece’s tactile and nostalgic feel so brilliantly captured by Welch.
It is an ensemble piece, feel-good and delightfully accessible, from the infectiously fun way the dancers ride the music with ease – hips swiveling, shoulders seesawing, heads bopping – on the more upbeat tracks to the supple fluidity of the more meditative and emotionally charged sections, like “Scarborough Fair” and “The Only Living Boy in New York.” That said, the piece is not without standout solo work. Neal Burks masterfully sets tone and shows off impressive control. Eric Best captivatingly closes out “The Only Living Boy in New York.” And then there’s Simone Acri, who quite literally pushes up his sleeves to earn the most oohs and aahs of the evening during “Baby Driver.” The song’s got a twang and all of the dancers on stage offer up an attitude to match, but it is Acri’s go-for-broke stamina and dizzying pirouettes à la seconde that push the section into overdrive.
Following an intermission, we’re gifted Ben Stevenson’s Four Last Songs, an approximately 31-minute work set to the song cycle of the same name by Richard Strauss. Stevenson’s full work, born from a pas de deux created following the death of founding Houston Ballet board member Winifred Wallace, originally premiered in 1980. Unsurprisingly, and like Strauss’s song cycle, Stevenson’s work is elegiac. It’s visceral, and like the billowy fabric that floats over the stage, courtesy of costume and scenic designer Matthew C. Jacobs, the place Stevenson’s conceived is one suspended in an emotionally devastating liminal space.
The piece opens in silence. (Or, at least, it’s supposed to. Thanks patron who didn’t turn off their cellphone. But that’s neither here nor there.) It moves from spring (“Frühling”) to twilight (“Im Abendrot”), with Sayako Toku and Jack Wolff first emerging from an ensemble of eight for a sweet duet. They pass the stage over for a memorable pas de trois danced by Tyler Donatelli, Aaron Daniel Sharratt, and Riley McMurray, their bright interplay leading into a heart-wrenching pas de deux between Karina Gonzalez and Connor Walsh.
Stevenson’s choreography is achingly tender and intimate, and Four Last Songs closes with a section led by Jessica Collado, who brings it to a soul-shattering end, the pain written across her face doing as much as her growing gestures to carry the piece, and its dancers, to finality. Of note, soprano Nicole Heaston joined the Houston Ballet Orchestra in the pit, bringing to life gorgeously long phrases and delivering gut-punch crescendos alongside the lavish orchestration at the baton of Conductor Simon Thew.
The audience is thrown headlong from feeling to form after a final intermission, with George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations taking the stage. In one sweeping movement with a dozen variations, and with chandeliers overhead and dancers in tutus, Balanchine harkens back to a bygone golden age, a celebration and appreciation of Russian classicism that is frankly overwhelming in grandeur. Set to music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the piece, which premiered in 1947, is technically demanding and arduous, but luxurious to the eyes and nearly impossible to take in with only one viewing.
Walsh returns to dance lead opposite Jacquelyn Long with 24 dancers behind them, the choreography building and evolving throughout. Long shines in her role, dancing with such fluidity and delicacy while remaining completely in command of the stage at all times. The footwork, and pointe work, is a marvel, intricate and careful, each articulation precise. The formations accomplished to support Walsh and Long are sights to behold, and the culmination in the final polonaise ends the program (and the evening) on much deserved triumphant note.
Performances will continue through June 22 at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays at the Wortham Theater Center, 501 Texas. For more information, call 713-227-2787 or visit houstonballet.org. $47-$159.
