Elliot B. Goldenthal is too much.
The composer, whose ballet Othello has its West Coast premiere with San Francisco Ballet this week, is famously at home with stage and screen, with small ensembles and large orchestras, with songs.
It was his movie music that made Brad Pitt swoon in Tom Cruise's arms in “Interview with the Vampire”, helped Val Kilmer smolder in “Batman Forever” and – almost – kept Sharon Stone from tanking in Barry Levinson's “Sphere”. In Neil Jordan's “Butcher Boy”, Goldenthal's next motion-picture score, he has been entrusted by the Irish filmmaker with turning Sinèad O'Connor into a musical apparition of the Virgin Mary.
He has earned nominations for Grammys, Oscars, and Golden Globes as well as for Tony and Drama Desk awards. He won an Obie for his collaboration with Julie Taymor in Juan Darien: A Requiem Mass [sic] at Lincoln Center. His Vietnam oratorio ‘Fire Water Paper’ was critically praised at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. Next up, between Hollywood assignments, is his opera Grendel. Like his teachers Aaron Copland and John Corigliano, Goldenthal enjoys working “in as many compositional areas as possible – and why not?”
“You'd be surprised at the compositional freedom I have found in this self-imposed indentured labor,” Goldenthal says. He calls his work on Michael Mann's “Heat” “my worst experience in Hollywood,” but counters it with several movies where his imagination has been given room to grow.
“Alien 3” meant wildly varied orchestral possibilities, for instance. “It refreshes me to go from one to the other. Work in movies, work in theater, in the concert hall – all these feed each other,” Goldenthal says.
When Lar Lubovitch, the most versatile American choreographer this side of Jerome Robbins, needed a composer for his ballet Othello, the choice had to be an artist with at least as varied a range as his own sensibilities dictate. Lubovitch chose Goldenthal, and the match makes sense.
Lubovitch also defies categorization, and his dances have been gloriously eclectic. “I simply like to speak different languages in dance,” he said recently. He means it.
The dynamic creator of Othello has been in demand on Broadway and the West End, at the American Ballet Theatre, Ballet Rambert, Paris Opera Ballet and Maurice Bejart's Ballet of the 20th Century. He danced as a go-go boy in Manhattan, later starred with the Harkness Ballet and became one of the most distinctive dancers of his generation.
His own Lar Lubovitch Dance Company has been a major force in American dance for a quarter century, and his work in the American musical has been unforgettable, from Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods to The Red Shoes and the recent The King and I. Even as he readies Othello for its San Francisco Ballet premiere, Lubovitch is also choreographing the American Conservatory Theater's High Society, having replaced Christopher D'Amboise on the show's road to Broadway.
Othello is a first for both men, however; a rarity in American ballet. Not only is it unusual for a new ballet these days to boast a newly commissioned score, but it is even more unusual for a new ballet to follow the old expansive three-act model; this Othello is epic, dramatic and powerful. It may signal a welcome trend away from the Balanchine pattern of short pieces strung together to make an evening, a return to work strong enough to hold the audience with a single, powerful dramatic vision.
This unprecedented collaboration of the American Ballet Theatre and San Francisco Ballet, first danced by ABT at the Metropolitan Opera last season, is a major leap forward in American dance. It is also an exciting chapter in American music.