Music: Nightmare in Manhattan

A 32-year-old stage number that was long too hot for Europe got its U.S. premiere in Manhattan last week, and hardly anybody raised an eyebrow. The work: a nightmarish ballet fantasy entitled The Miraculous Mandarin, set to the 1919 music of Hungarian Bela Bartok. Its main characters: a prostitute and a Chinese mandarin whose love for her is stronger than death.

Because of the theme and its lurid treatment, Bartok’s own Budapest banned Mandarin until 1946. Manhattan’s City Ballet Company was under no such inhibition. City Center cast sinewy Melissa Hayden as the streetwalker, picked Veteran Dancer Hugh Laing as the mandarin, and called in the public.

A series of taut opening scenes sets the spirit of the piece: leering and wriggling, the streetwalker lures her men one by one to a corner where her hoodlum accomplices beat and rob them. It is easy until the mandarin enters: he has to be thrashed, stabbed, choked and finally hanged before he can be made to die. That moves even the streetwalker. Too late, she realizes what the power of passion can be, throws herself on the mandarin’s still body in almost necrophilic abandon.

Ballerina Hayden’s violent wanton was a triumph; Hugh Laing played the mandarin with implacable simplicity. Without Bartok’s superb score, Mandarin might have been merely a mediocre and rather crass affair, but the crashing, nervous music had kept the emotional pitch high and tight. As a result, the audience was too preoccupied to worry much about a few tag ends of murky symbolism that Choreographer Todd Bolender had worked in, e.g., a blind girl who wanders fitfully about the stage for most of the final scene.

Agreed Manhattan critics: an effective production. But John Martin of the New York Times had the feeling that he had been watching a period piece. Wrote Critic Martin, in a generally laudatory review: “The music, the idea and the incidents add up to a fairly representative picture of that neurosis which was Central Europe at the time of the first World War . . . [But] its present production may very well be 30 years too late.”