Bible Stories Meet Music Hall

Abstract

The very subject matter of Billy Sunday—a Midwestern, Prohibitionist evangelist—might make some New Yorkers suspicious of a lack of sophistication. Nonetheless, Page’s new ballet gave critics, censors, and balletomanes ample reason to balk. Starring Frederic Franklin as Billy and Alexandra Danilova as Mrs. Potiphar and premiered by Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at New York City Center, Billy Sunday (1948) broke the first rule of ballet—no speaking. However, this was but the first of several formal transgressions in Page’s Bible-story revue rendering the populist preacher’s flamboyant, streetwise style. In Billy Sunday, Page turned her sense of the ridiculous toward gender, sexuality, moralistic sanctimony, and religious revivalism—even the conventions of ballet itself. She used spectacle and burlesque to comment on the performativity of such institutions—their disassociation from any unitary, natural essence or incontrovertible core of rightness. Indeed, if one defines spectacle in terms of phantasm—fabricated, irreducible excess—then it was precisely the ballet’s spectacular elements that pointed up the satire. Gender hyperbole/parody and defamiliarizing of desire though a woman’s perspective lay the core of her method. In stark contrast to revivalism’s “feminization of sin,” in Page’s choreography, campy excess of the female body ultimately capsized the staged sermons’ censure of female identity. A postmortem reveals the reasons for Billy Sunday’s failure: a weak musical score, a mediocre spoken text, and Ballet Russe’s far-from-ideal rehearsal conditions. Some thought the choreography “vulgarized” ballet. Nonetheless, Billy Sunday remains a hilarious pastiche in memory’s ballet hall of fame.