Four Utah premieres featuring works by two choreographers who have had a major impact on ballet and Broadway are on deck for Ballet West’s newest production West Side Story: Broadway & Beyond, which opens Friday, April 10, to start a run of six performances in the Capitol Theatre.
In a literal storybook season for the company, this newest production portends to be the most dynamic and anticipated offering this year. “When I was putting the program together, I was thinking that there always has been such a connection between the Broadway stage and classical ballet,” Adam Sklute, Ballet West artistic director, said in an interview with The Utah Review. “Some of the greatest ballet choreographers, certainly of the early and mid-20th century and into the 21st century, have either had their start or have gone fluidly between Broadway and classical ballet.” This group includes choreographers such as George Balanchine and Agnes de Mille. And, of course, others are Jerome Robbins and Christopher Wheeldon, whose works are featured on this Ballet West quadruple bill.
The first of two Robbins’ works will be the 30-minute suite adapted from West Side Story, the 1957 Broadway musical which Robbins conceived, directed and choreographed. For its 1995 premiere by the New York City Ballet, Robbins developed the suite from six West Side Story excerpts taken from his anthology Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, and added Something’s Coming, which is the first act solo in the original musical that Tony sings before he has met Maria. The other Robbins’ work is a ballet for eight women, Antique Epigraphs, which premiered in 1984 at the New York City Ballet.
Sklute waited patiently for years to bring these two Robbins’ works to the stage. “I was working to bring the West Side Story Suite to Ballet West for over ten years and it is all about having the proper casting because so much of it has to be people who can be comfortable both in the classic ballet and Broadway jazz vernacular,” he explained, adding that it requires dancers “who are not afraid to both vocalize in singing and calling out things on stage, as they will do in this suite.”
Among Robbins’ final works before he died in 1998, it was Peter Martins, then the ballet master-in-chief for the New York City Ballet, who urged the choreographer to put together the suite of dances. It loosely tells the original musical’s story starting from the conflicts of the Jets and Sharks. The suite opens with a spoken prologue and continues with Something’s Coming, The Dance at the Gym, America, Cool and The Rumble before ending with Somewhere. In addition to singers in the pit for some of the numbers, with the Ballet West Orchestra, conducted by Jared Oaks, dancers on stage also will be singing.
“This is not just another program,” Sklute said. “This is an event unlike anything Ballet West has ever put on.” Working with the company dancers has been Robert La Fosse, the New York City Ballet dancer who played Tony both in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (which won six Tony Awards in 1989 including Best Musical) and the West Side Story Suite. During rehearsals, Sklute noted that La Fosse “was also struck by a discovery that tends to happen when dancers are asked to step outside their comfort zone.” He added, “One dancer, Corps Artist Mikayla Gyfteas, had never sung before. Within the first week of rehearsals, she found her voice. By the end, it had grown stronger every time she walked into the room.”
Two guest artists will join the company for the suite. Highlighted in the role of Tony for three of the run’s six performances will be Robbie Fairchild, a Ballet West Academy alumnus who went on to become a principal artist at New York City Ballet and earn a Tony nomination for his Broadway role in Wheeldon’s An American in Paris. As Anita for the production run, the most important female lead after Maria and featured in America, Georgina Pazcoguin is a former New York City Ballet soloist, Broadway performer, and one of the last artists personally coached in that role by Broadway legend Chita Rivera, the original Anita.
Evoking Greek antiquity, Robbins set the choreography for Antique Epigraphs with music based on six antique epigraphs orchestrated by Claude Debussy which the composer originally wrote to accompany the intimate, erotic prose poetry of Pierre Louÿs, as part of the set of songs Chansons de Bilitis (1897). The final section of the ballet also features a solo flute melody. “Robbins creates a physical poem based on the texts that Debussy was inspired by,” Sklute said. “Robbins is a master of creating effect with minimal gesture; almost more than any other choreographer he can create so much with so little — just a gesture of the arm, a turn of the head, a look in the eyes.”
He added that one critic reviewing Antique Epigraphs noted the allusions to the original Afternoon of A Faun choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky to the music by Debussy. Sklute explained that the critic said about the ballet: “This is what the nymphs are doing when the faun is not around.”
Like Robbins, Wheeldon has seamlessly travelled back and forth between Ballet and Broadway, winning numerous honors in both worlds of choreography. He won Tony Awards for Best Choreography for An American in Paris (2015) and MJ The Musical (2022), which also won the Olivier Award for Best Choreography in 2025. Ballet West audiences will recall the breathtaking transcendental performance of Wheeldon’s 2008 Within the Golden Hour, which received its Utah premiere in 2024.
The first of two Wheeldon pieces on the bill is Carousel (A Dance), which Sklute characterizes as a dance poem inspired by the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical of the same name. In 2002, as part of New York City Ballet’s tribute to the centennial of Richard Rodgers, Wheeldon took an arrangement of two of the musical’s greatest numbers— The Carousel Waltz and If I Loved You— and recreated in ballet form the iconic dream sequence that marked great Broadway musicals of the 1940s, such as Carousel. Wheeldon’s version evokes the romance between Billy Bigelow, the carnival barker, and Julie Jordan, the young woman who works at the town mill.
The second Wheeldon selection features the pas de deux from After the Rain, which the New York City Ballet premiered in 2005, as part of a celebration of George Balanchine’s anniversary of his birth. The pas de deux is set to Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, one of the Estonian composer’s best known works and which is ideal for choreomusic impact. It follows a strict structure with every ascending melodic phrase mirrored by a descending phrase, and the solo melody always returns home to the central pitch “after being away,” while the piano accompaniment functions, as Pärt explained, “like a guardian angel.” Many also will recognize the piano’s tintinnabuli notes, which sound like little bells that go above and below the melodic line, enhancing the composition’s already strict structure.
Sklute programmed the work specifically for Emily Adams, principal artist, who is celebrating her 20th year with the company. Ballet West also is fortunate to have Michele Gifford, a former New York City Ballet dancer who is currently an in-house stager and répétiteur for Wheeldon works as well as for the George Balanchine Trust.
For tickets and more information about the production, which will continue through April 18, see the Ballet West website.