Roush Review: At the Ballet in ‘Étoile,’ a Dance Comedy with a Heavy Foot

Étoile

Matt's Rating:

There’s no denying the love for dance that flows throughout Étoile (French for “star”), a passion project for Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, the dynamic duo of writing-directing-producing auteurs who delighted us for years with the hyperverbal screwball joys of Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. In their new series for Prime Video, which in an ill-advised move is dropping all eight episodes at once for a too-much-is-too-much binge, they return to the world of ballet, the setting for their gone-too-soon 2012-13 show Bunheads, a charmingly modest heartwarmer set at a small-town ballet school.

In Étoile, everything is on a much grander scale, with colorfully neurotic and excessively eccentric characters operating — and talking, babbling, on occasion speechifying — in the high-profile cultural capitals of New York City (Lincoln Center, to be exact) and Paris. When the spotlight turns on the tortured, temperamental artists in rehearsal or performance, it’s all very dazzling. Unfortunately, those moments can be fleeting, and because so much of the rest of the show isn’t quite as light on its feet, sacrificing charm for tiresomely melodramatic histrionics, you may wish they’d all sometimes just shut up and get on with the dance.

The strong cast (including recurring roles for Gilmore alums Kelly Bishop and Yanic Truesdale) is led by Emmy winner Luke Kirby, who killed as Mrs. Maisel‘s Lenny Bruce but is hampered by a perpetually furrowed brow as Jack McMillan, the suave if harried executive director of the (fictional) Metropolitan Ballet Theater. In a bold move of desperation to keep the company afloat, he agrees to an across-the-pond talent swap with an equally beleaguered Paris operation. His French counterpart, Geneviève Lavigne (a frenetic Charlotte Gainsbourg), has even more at stake, because she lacks Jack’s family connections and fortune and knows if this experiment doesn’t work, she’s out of a job.

Geneviève’s biggest risk is giving up her greatest star, the intensely terrifying étoile diva Cheyenne Toussaint (Lou de Laâge, sensational), in exchange for a young ballerina (Taïs Vinolo) her company once rejected but whose mother happens to be the French culture minister, and more critically, the up-and-coming choreographer Tobias Bell (Mrs. Maisel‘s Gideon Glick), a mercurial loose cannon accurately described as a “helpless genius.” Cheyenne and Tobias are both disrupters, exasperating anyone who foolishly tries to rein them in. And in the case of Cheyenne, often crushing the spirit of fellow dancers young and old with blood-chilling soliloquies delivered with a Medusa-like glare.

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Is she a monster? Not really. That role is reserved for the deep-pocketed and flamboyantly debauched benefactor Crispin Shamblee (Simon Callow, milking every moment), whose background in corporate dark arts is as shady as his enthusiasm for the fine arts is genuine. Jack loathes him, but money talks, just like everything else here.

While she’s fearsome in attitude, Cheyenne reveals her more tender side when she discovers a young girl, the adorable SuSu (LaMay Zhang), dutifully practicing alone after hours while her mother, a cleaning lady, works, and takes the child under her formidable wing. Cheyenne also delivers the show’s mission statement in a public interview forum when another young girl, who gave up her dancing dreams for school, asks if this étoile ever considered another path. The answer, of course, is no: “Dance lets you float above it all. It lets you play in the clouds. And when I dance, I want the audience to play with me, to dance in the clouds, to feel what I feel, to hear my song.”

When Étoile stops trying too hard and gives itself up to that sort of starry-eyed euphoria, it’s a terpsichorean treasure.

Étoile, Series Premiere (eight episodes), Thursday, April 24, Prime Video