‘They’re annoying and stupid and slow everything down. Nobody likes a dream ballet!” That’s a quote from Apple TV+’sSchmigadoon!, the musical theatre parody that could only have been made by people who absolutely love (almost) all things musicals. Drew McOnie is having none of it. “Maybe we should put that on the poster,” he jokes, since he has commissioned a triple bill of dream ballets for hisinaugural seasonas artistic director at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre.
What’s a dream ballet anyway, you may ask. It’s the bit in a musical where the dialogue and songs stop and dance takes over, often to delve into the psyche of a character at a crossroads. Agnes de Mille’s original dream ballet for 1943’s Oklahoma! was called Laurey Makes Up Her Mind – she had to decide between two suitors – and it was a major moment for dance on Broadway. Other famous dream ballets include in the 1951 film An American in Paris, where Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron spend 17 minutesdancing through elaborate painted stage-sets of Paris, or Singin’ in the Rain’s Broadway Melody, a film within a film.
Some musical theatre fans may think all that dancing interrupts the action, but McOnie couldn’t agree less. “I’ve been completely captivated by them since I was a kid. I was obsessed with them,” he says. In fact, he had the idea for this triple bill when he was 16. “I embarrassed myself by pulling out some original artwork that I’d made for it, begging someone to let me do it,” he laughs at his precociousness. Rather than reproduce the originals, McOnie’s idea was to reinterpret three classic De Mille dream ballets, from Oklahoma!, Carousel and Allegro (“Which I think nobody’s seen”). Luckily, in the intervening 23 years, McOnie has gone from ambitious dance student to award-winning choreographer (In the Heights, Jesus Christ Superstar, Hairspray), West End andBroadwaydirector (Strictly Ballroom, King Kong) and now the top job at Regent’s Park, so he doesn’t have to beg to realise his ideas any more, and this one was straight on the list for his first season.
McOnie explains that the power of the dream ballet lies in “being able to express something that words aren’t able to, the inner psychology of a character like Laurey”. De Mille’s work on Oklahoma! was, he says, “completely gamechanging”. “It liberated our form of storytelling and offered something really human and deeply revealing about the characters. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of giving choreographers the pen for a moment to write the story.”
Back in the day, McOnie imagined himself making the ballets, but now he’s commissioned three very different choreographers to do it instead. There’sShelley Maxwell, who works mostly as a movement director in theatre and film (from plays at the National Theatre to superhero film The Marvels);Kate Prince, best known for hip-hop company ZooNation and Message in a Bottle set to Sting songs, as well as the musical Everyone’s Talking About Jamie; andJulia Cheng, who started out in hip-hop and waacking but has gone on to choreograph for award-winning musical revivals of Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof. McOnie admits Cheng first came on to his radar because he desperately wanted the choreography job on Cabaret himself. “And when I went to see the show, I said, this is just brilliant, and so, so different to what I would have done.”
That’s exactly the idea here, to do something McOnie wouldn’t have thought of, something “untraditional”, he says. The choreographers are not confined by the stories of the original musicals, but have been asked to take the music as inspiration to do something they wouldn’t normally do, dancing to the rich, orchestral scores ofRodgers and Hammerstein.
When I meet Prince a couple of days into rehearsal, that rich, orchestral sound from Carousel has got her flummoxed. Unlike the usual hip-hop and R&B soundtracks she uses, “There’s not a beat in sight!” she says. “I am well out of my comfort zone!” When she first listened to the music, “all I could envisage was people in sailor suits skipping around playing the flute”. Prince has been working with orchestratorSimon Haleto strip back the music in places, “and not have to have the whole shebang. The shebang’s amazing,” she adds, “but all the way through it feels a bit much.”
In the studio, there are no sailor suits and no skipping. Instead her dancers – including Tommy Franzen, winner of best male dancer at the recent NationalDanceawards – are working on locking and lyrical breaking and other hip-hop styles. “I find the fast, staccato string sections are really fun to do isolations to,” says Prince. The dancers are tethered to bungee cords, representing the things in their pasts that are holding them back, with Franzen as the villain at the centre pulling the strings. “He never plays the villain, he’s always the goodie!” she adds, delightedly.
A couple of miles down the road in east London, the waltzing, swirling strains of Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ from Oklahoma! emerge from a different dance studio, instantly conjuring up images of prairies, cowboys and wholesome farm girls. For Maxwell, it took a while to get her head out of the MGM musicals she grew up with and find a different approach. In the end she’s using the music’s familiarity to her advantage. It’s an orchestral version of the song, but as soon as you hear it, you can’t help think of the words, “Oh what a beautiful morning ...” and Maxwell’s dance is like a sarcastic take on that: Is it a beautiful morning? Really? Her piece sees characters morphing into clowns and is a comment on the current political landscape, which “feels slightly like a circus”.
Maxwell loves the possibilities of the dream ballet as a form, “when the character needs to express themselves in a way that goes beyond words”, but it has to be said they’re not very common in contemporary musicals. Perhaps because dance is integrated much more into shows than it was. “It used to be you’d have your opera chorus and a ballet chorus and your actors,” says McOnie. “Now companies are expected to be able to do everything.”
Along with De Mille, Jerome Robbins was another great choreographer of dream ballets – although the film version of West Side Story cut its dream ballet from the number Somewhere after Robbins was sacked halfway through filming (it still has the dance at the gym, where Tony and Maria first meet and the rest of the world falls away).Bradley Cooperpaid homage to Robbins in his Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, when he and Carey Mulligan get swept into a dance scene based on the ballet Fancy Free and On the Town, the musical it spawned (the scene was choreographed by New York City Ballet’s Justin Peck). It captures their love affair, and was an alternative, Cooper has said, to doing a predictable montage of their relationship. Cooper trained hard, apparently, to be able to do all the dancing himself.
Dream ballets have popped up in other films, too. The Coen Brothers are fans, having Tim Robbins dance to Carmen in the The Hudsucker Proxy, and the surreal dancing girls with bowling-pin headdresses in The Big Lebowski. Even I’m Just Ken from the Barbie movie has been called a dream ballet, although it’s a song rather than an instrumental, but it’s an extended dance scene that gives an insight into a character’s psychology, so why not.
Back at Regent’s Park, Cheng is busy at work on a scene that wouldn’t look out of place in some of the early musicals. One of her inspirations was Looney Tunes cartoons of the 1930s and 40s, because that’s what the music from Allegro reminded her of, and the dance has a bouncy, jazzy feel with sharp comic timing and lots of props to play with – umbrella, newspaper, police officer’s helmet.
“I was thinking about how heavy the world is right now,” she tells me, “and I didn’t want to do anything like that. I wanted to do a humorous, light piece, a comedy, but it’s got a harder context underneath.” Her piece is set around a park bench where a dreamer/nomad character pushes his belongings in a shopping trolley, and there’s a moral about appreciating the simple things in life (you’ll have to go and see it to find out more).
For all the challenges of making a dream ballet, Prince tells me how excited she is about what McOnie is doing at Regent’s Park. “I don’t know of any other organisations that have appointed someone who is predominantly a choreographer as artistic director. That’s a breath of fresh air, as well as the fact that the first thing he does is programme something like this and promote three female choreographers.”
McOnie is a great advocate for dance, just as De Mille was in her day. “It’s basically the belief that there is a value in this tool of storytelling, that dance isn’t just showgirls, that it can tell the stories of everybody,” he says. “So that’s why I love dream ballets, and, you know, I’d love to put them back into musicals wherever possible!”
Dream Ballets: A Triple Bill is atRegent’s Park Open Air theatre, London, 19-22 June