To Found a Troupe, It takes a driven man to carry off a highwire act like that, and Mr. Weiss, a New York City Ballet alumnus known to all as Ricky, is nothing if not driven. A quarter-century ago, one dance writer compared him to Jimmy Porter, the seething young working-class antihero of John Osborne’s play “Look Back in Anger”; at 50, he is still an in-your-face lapel-grabber, more polished but just as tough. He has had to be tough. After running Pennsylvania Ballet for eight years, Mr. Weiss ran afoul of the board and was fired in 1990. He spent the next six years looking for a job. “I got a raw deal, and I had a very hard time,” he says. “I sent out resumes and auditioned for every post that opened up there were 13 of them. Sometimes I’d come in second, but never first.”You’d think a ballet company situated well below the Mason-Dixon line would have preferred someone more genteel. But the South has changed, and though the board chairman, J. Ward Purrington, a Raleigh native, has a magnolia-sweet accent that any Hollywood casting director would covet, he is also a no-nonsense lawyer who speaks of Carolina Ballet as if it were a new Internet company: “What this is, is a venture start-up. You have to be lean and agile, and very, very good, and you have to grow as fast as you can.”In fact, Mr. Purrington is not quite as hard-headed as he sounds. He fell in love with dance when his daughter, Lindsay (who is now a promising member of the Carolina Ballet corps), took him to a Boston Ballet performance of “Sleeping Beauty.” “It was the first real ballet I’d ever seen,” he says, “and I was bowled over by the grandeur and elegance of it.” But he promptly dusted himself off and started thinking in terms of civic pride. “This area is probably one of the fastest-growing, most prosperous areas in the country,” he.says. “ We have a symphony, we have decent theater but to be a whole community culturally, we had to have ballet.”After an abortive attempt to use a local dance school as the basis for a professional troupe, Mr. Purrington realized that he would have to build from the ground up, so he advertised for an artistic director; he received 98 applications, all but one with fulsome cover letters and inch-thick resumes. The exception was Mr. Weiss, who sent a four-sentence letter and a one-page vita. “I’d had it up to there with looking for a job,” he says. “What did I know about North Carolina? Who was Ward Purrington?” But his bluntness impressed Mr. Purrington, and the two men started talking. Four months later, Mr. Weiss finally came in first.“Ward said he wanted to start a ballet company on the highest level,” Mr. Weiss recalls. “I told him that every little city in America has a little company with a million-dollar budget, and they’re all trying to pander to what they think the public wants. You can’t do that if you want to do something real. You have to go for quality and seriousness, right from the startógood dancers, good ballets, good decor and that takes money. A million and a half is the least you can start with. So I said we’d have to spend a year and a half raising money and community awareness before I could even think of hiring dancers or giving a performance.”According to Debra Austin, the ballet mistress, who danced with Mr. Weiss at New York City Ballet and for him at Pennsylvania Ballet, that was exactly what happened: “Ricky insisted that they raise enough money up front to pay the dancers for a full year, so that it wouldn’t be a fly-by-night thing. We actually had subscribers before anyone had seen a single dancer onstage.”Ms. Austin is not exaggerating: Carolina Ballet sold 2,600 subscriptions and raised $1.2 million in advance of its inaugural season. While Mr. Purrington and the board were busy shaking down local contributors, Mr. Weiss was off looking for talented dancers willing to move to Raleigh. One is part of the family Melissa Podcasy, Mr. Weiss’s wife, who is the company’s striking prima ballerina. Some, including Ms. Austin and her husband, the ballet master Marin Boieru, had worked with him in Philadelphia; others were drawn by the opportunity to be present at the creation of a new company.Among the latter was Daphne Falcone, a bold, eye-catchingly vivid performer who created the small but choice role of a saucy street dancer in Mr. Weiss’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which had its premiere last May. Ms. Falcone, 23, is a Manhattan-born graduate of the School of American Ballet who came to Raleigh after four years with Miami City Ballet. “I felt stalled in Miami and wanted a change,” she says. “My mother read an article in Dance magazine about Carolina Ballet. I didn’t know anything about Ricky, but I asked around and heard he was a totally great guy, so I auditioned for him. I wanted to be doing really good roles, and when he told me I wouldn’t be doing any corps roles, that I’d be a featured dancer, I decided to say yes.”Much to Mr. Weiss’s surprise, Ms. Falcone turned down an offer from the well-established San Francisco Ballet to join his fledgling company. “He was, like, ’You’re turning down San Francisco?’ ” she says. “I knew it was a steady thing, and the pay actually would have been a lot better, but that’s not as important as being out there and dancing challenging roles. It was a little scary at first: you hear a lot about companies that pop up and then fold. But everybody clicked, and everybody was excited about being here right from the start. We’re a very silly company nobody here is afraid to laugh. And you can be yourself. You don’t have to act like a total bunhead around Ricky.”Mr. Weiss clearly knows how to get the best out of his dancers: Carolina Ballet is already a characterful, well-disciplined and exciting company. All these traits are displayed in his taut, compact staging of “Romeo and Juliet,” whose speed and dramatic clarity are reminiscent of George Balanchine’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Nobody stands around and strikes poses in this fast-moving “Romeo,” which is performed on a simple but handsome set designed by Thomas Mauney and built for the laughably low cost of $22,000. Like Balanchine, Mr. Weiss tells Shakespeare’s story through lively dancing; the fight scenes, choreographed by Jeff A. R. Jones, a specialist in stage combat, are full of loud and believable swordplay; and the pas de deux swell with intense emotion. The result is a “Romeo” that can easily stand comparison with any of the better-known ballet versions.Midway through Carolina Ballet’s second season, Mr. Weiss appears to have found the seasonal cash cow without which no regional ballet company can hope to pay its bills his staged version of Handel’s “Messiah” drew enthusiastic crowds in December and his “Romeo” was recently taped for broadcast by UNC-TV, North Carolina’s public television network. The company has hired five additional dancers and will be working 36 weeks this year (up four from last season) on a $2.5 rnillion budget. Even at this early stage, comparisons with Edward Villella’s start-up of Miami City Ballet in 1986, though still premature, are beginning to sound increasingly plausible. “Ricky has made me realize,” says Mr. Purrington, “that we really can have a company of national significance, right here in Raleigh.”For that to happen, of course, the citizens of North Carolina must first be persuaded that Carolina Ballet is worth supporting. Mr. Weiss says, “Ward tells people that whether you like it or not, ballet is important for the community but if you give it a try, you just might like it.”You don’t have to do much eavesdropping at intermission to learn that a great many people in and around Raleigh are finding that they like it a lot. One man who came to “Romeo” announced with gusto, “This sure beats all that wherefore-art-thou stuff!” Told of the remark, Mr. Weiss laughed loudly and said, “A few more like that guy and we’ll be home free.”
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