‘Jolly Moxie’ features live music from the Colorado Jazz Orchestra

Jolly Moxie is a very different kind of show for Wonderbound. The company’s productions tend toward story ballets, although certainly not the sort that classical ballet companies offer. Artistic Director Garrett Ammon’s are unique, often a contemporary take on a well-known tale like that of Sleeping Beauty, Faust or Samson and Delilah.

Ammon is a master at creating compelling mashups of those stories complete with dramatic, movable sets that he designs to convey a range of environments and moods. The result is typically a coherent evening of movement and music that provides nonstop energy and visual interest.

Jolly Moxie is another thing altogether — and a not entirely successful one. Like virtually all of Ammon’s works, it features live music and his demanding, rapid-fire choreography. But rather than conveying any kind of overall narrative Jolly Moxie is a series of 16 individual pure dance scenes set to songs drawn from the American popular songbook.

Some audience members might see story vignettes in some of the pas de deux, but I did not. After a while, the different sections became visually and musically repetitive. The movement style is essentially the same throughout and becomes surprisingly tiresome toward the end of the first act. The second act continues in the same vein, although the dancers do a yeoman’s job of trying to inject some variety of mood into the various songs.

Live band

Live music is provided by the Colorado Jazz Repertory Orchestra; this is the first collaboration between Wonderbound and the Orchestra and is somewhat less successful than Ammon’s involvement with other local musical groups. Typically in Wonderbound’s productions, the music serves as an engaging but secondary theatrical element and it’s never hard to focus primarily on the dancing and staging. Here, however, the music and the movement mostly compete for attention.

Apart from the sameness of much of the choreography, this is also due to the fact that the only set pieces for the dancers are a few scattered café tables where they occasionally rest between songs. Otherwise, the stage is dominated by a brightly lit, raised orchestra platform. With lighting effects that spotlight the shiny brass instruments and the sparkly Kelly-green gown of vocalist Lady May Mayfield, one is often tempted to look at the singer or musicians rather than the dancers.

To be sure, Wonderbound’s dancers dazzle in Jolly Moxie, as they always do; the 12 company members are effectively all principal dancers — and each one is a standout. Technically powerful, they have expansive extensions with arms and legs that seem to go on forever. They manage Ammon’s whiplash turns, lifts and leaps with fearlessness and precision. Unfortunately, there just isn’t much opportunity here for them to demonstrate the emotional intensity and dramatic flair that is among Wonderbound’s most distinctive and impressive qualities.