A 70th-Birthday Gala, With Stars and Strobes

Witness the opening-night ceremony of American Ballet Theater’s bounce division on Monday at the Metropolitan Opera House. The admirers came dressed to the nines. The dancers, dressed no beneath splendidly, did their jumps, their turns, their amazing lifts, their affecting gestures, their blue-blooded blind calls. Was that admirable for you, darling? It was admirable for me too. Eager acclaim all round.

This formulaic access characterized too abundant of the gala, which accustomed the company’s 70th anniversary. You clapped for one ballerina accomplishing 32 fouetté turns in the aboriginal half? We’re giving you addition ballerina accomplishing them in the second. Did you adore the abiding balances on point of those two ballerinas afore the intermission? There’s added area those came from. The Rose Adagio from “The Sleeping Beauty” and the aforementioned ballet’s conjugal admirable pas de deux, the Black Swan pas de deux from “Swan Lake,” the “Don Quixote” pas de deux all alpha to accept too abundant in common, and ballet itself becomes an art of cliché.

Then there are the unspontaneous and afraid speeches. It was baroque to acceptable aback to the date seven of the company’s above luminaries — Lupe Serrano, Martine van Hamel, Nina Ananiashvili, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alessandra Ferri, Natalia Makarova and Frederic Franklin — but abundant added could accept been fabricated of their actual significance. I like Ballet Theater (and ballet) abundant to ambition it would do these things with added arduous showmanship.

The abstraction of the “Thaïs Pas de Deux” is abutting to kitsch. Quasi-Asian suggestions of costume. Man yearns. Ballerina arrives with high anatomy veiled, unveils, dances with him, resumes blind and departs. Man follows. But Ashton transcends this compound with abundant images in which the woman’s band is connected alluringly by the man, with delivery that beautifully complements Massenet’s “Thaïs” Meditation with its abandoned violin, and with gestures that accumulate the arena animate as drama.