Étoile comes from Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband, whose last foray into ballet was Bunheads, a show I really wanted to like but DEEPLY did not. For me, it exposed her worst tic: no one taking a breath between sentences, and long scenes between two people who are not listening to each other and/or really even talking TO each other. The worst version of this was a scene that I think lasted an entire act, in which a girl thought a boy was proposing and she spent 10 minutes monologuing about why this was or wasn’t a good idea, and a) it was so painfully obvious she misunderstood, like I am not even sure the two of them had been on a date at this point?!?, and b) HE didn’t correct her until the END of it. Ugh. A lot of her subsequent work had a lot of that, too, and it always makes me so impatient. It’s like every segment of every show is created to be an audition piece for something else.
ANYHOO. The trailer for Étoile strikes a slightly more relaxed tone, but maybe that’s in the editing. The show is about the best goddamn dancers in New York and the best goddamn dancers in Paris, and how the two struggling companies decide the solution is to trade principals for a while.
I admit, I am curious.
[Photos: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images]
