This Cinderella Puts Her Own Spin on Kitchen Duty
<First published online in the New York Times on July 4, 2007>
James Kudelka’s “Cinderella,” on show this week at the Metropolitan Opera House with American Ballet Theater, would be a good idea for a ballet if only Mr. Kudelka’s idea were about ballet and if only he had the choreographic stagecraft to make good on it.
It starts out both unusual and promising. Cinderella, while her sisters prance grotesquely on their daggerlike points, goes barefoot. So the old “yes, you shall go to the ball” has a further twist: “Yes, you shall get your first pair of toe shoes.” And the story’s theme of rags to riches, from cinders to chic, has a different zing to it, anyway, for the production is set, more or less, in the 1920s. After the heroine has lost one of her shoes at midnight at the end of Act II, her dancing back home in the kitchen in Act III has an appealingly hobbled quality: one foot still in its sparkling point shoe, the other coping as gamely as its nakedness will permit.
Mr. Kudelka, however, is just not a dance maker of any distinction. He can show you Cinderella toward the end of Act I, sketching her first few happy steps on point, but he can’t sustain this for a full dance phrase, let alone for an entire dance, and he can’t when she’s hobbled, either.
That is virtually part of his characterization of her: though she wants toe shoes, she wants to be neither star nor ballerina. At the ball, despite arriving dressed like a glamour puss, she keeps melting in the glow of so much excitement, doting on the handsomeness and strength of her prince. She’s all “oh gosh, oh golly,” and “Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found you.”
Her prince, though Mr. Kudelka doesn’t give him anything original to do, does at least get to exhibit some heroism in conventionally ardent jumps and turns. Cinderella’s only strong moment comes when he isn’t present: back in the kitchen, she does fouetté turns, the most standard virtuoso step in the female dance vocabulary.
Mr. Kudelka makes this theatrically fresh in two ways: She’s not facing the audience but spinning for her own private pleasure, and her raised foot is bare. She remains otherwise a dance heroine whose dances are tepid. The ball she goes to is just another ball.
The production keeps starting to be a good show, even a good story. As it enters its final scene, for example, Cinderella and her prince don’t become fairy-tale royalty, they retire to a garden in the country Gatsby and Daisy becoming Daphnis and Chloë. Their pas de deux here includes the evening’s freshest choreographic moment, as each of them briskly indicates to the other, “With my body I thee worship,” with encircling arms.
But Mr. Kudelka then spoils the scene’s charm. Though the music suggests that Cinderella has now reached full magical transformation, her sisters come and spoil it with their vulgarity and their comic shtick. How many times does Mr. Kudelka make the shortsighted sister fall over during these three acts? Several too often. Meanwhile, he squanders theatrically poetic passages throughout Prokofiev’s score. When the music starts to announce that the heroine is about to arrive at the ball, the garden creatures who are Cinderella’s companions buzz around doing the same less-than-magical gestures so long that you’re bored, not excited, before she arrives. And when she enters, her pumpkin coach descends from the sky. It’s a theatrical moment but, like so many others here, not a dance one.
Julie Kent can be an intelligent, sensitive artist. Give her a MacMillan pas de deux, and she can find a new impulse, a new light and shade to it. She does not, however, have the dramatic authority to shape a full-evening role like Cinderella into a major dramatic arc, and since Mr. Kudelka gives her such thin material, her charm here becomes forced.
Marcelo Gomes is at his finest as her prince: handsome dancing, modest, relaxed, attentive. Martine van Hamel does what she can as a boozy Mae West stepmother, while Carmen Corella and Marian Butler work very hard as the stepsisters. It’s not their fault that these step-characters are unfunny and insufferable.
This production, which Ballet Theater acquired last year and with which it brings its current spring-summer season to a close, is the company’s third “Cinderella” since 1983. Frederick Ashton’s version for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden new in 1948, last seen in New York in 2004, the only version of Prokofiev’s ballet to have stood the test of time gives far better dancing and acting opportunities. Since a program essay on the dancer Ethan Stiefel refers to the company’s “ever growing Ashton repertory,” is it too much to hope that it will grow to include Ashton’s “Cinderella” too? It would showcase today’s Ballet Theater to something like perfection.
@New York Times, 2007