Wake Up, Princess, the Movies Are Calling

<First published online in the New York Times, June 4, 2007>

In the land of Ballet Ever After, two heroines meet. Odette mimes (as she does in the traditional “Swan Lake”), “That lake is made of my mother’s tears.” Whereupon Aurora (as refashioned in American Ballet Theater’s new production of “The Sleeping Beauty”) replies: “Lake! My mother cried me a river (remember the song?) when I pricked my finger and they thought I was dead. But my prince drank from the river’s waters and sailed up it to find me. ...”

Ballet Theater’s new “Beauty,” which opened Friday night at the Metropolitan Opera House, certainly isn’t hidebound by custom. Princess Aurora sleeps not a hundred years but half a millennium: When she pricks her finger, it’s the Middle Ages, and when she wakes, it’s the 18th century. This is “Sleeping Beauty” as seen through the lens of various movies.

Like Aragorn in “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” Prince Désiré has a waterlogged dream (he not only drinks from the river but also swoons into it) that leads him toward a vision of Princess Right. The boat that sails him up her mother’s tears is like a Harry Potter Hippogriff. The King, the Queen and the Master of Ceremonies, Catalabutte, all come out of my favorite Danny Kaye film, “The Court Jester” (“The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle”), and the wicked Carabosse is auditioning, unsuccessfully, for “The Wizard of Oz.” The designer, Tony Walton, has provided sets, especially the Sleeping Beauty’s tiny castle with its fat little towers, that are very Disney indeed. The unashamedly bold, often cheerfully clashing colors in both décor and costumes (by Willa Kim) are Disneyesque too, though surely Walt’s artists would have imitated Corot much less crudely in the autumnal treescape behind the Hunt scene.

There’s just one intermission in this staging, and only after it do you see quite how happy its directors — Kevin McKenzie, Gelsey Kirkland and Michael Chernov — have been to tell the old ballet anew, excising large chunks of the Hunt and Wedding, shifting the Act II entr’acte to accompany the Prince’s sleep and dream before the Vision and using Cinderella’s music to bring the fairies from the Prologue into the Wedding, giving the Gold Fairy’s music to the Lilac Fairy (as the Kirov Ballet used to).

This does become monstrously antimusical in one scene: when Tchaikovsky’s music, softly depicting the sleeping palace (my favorite passage of this composer’s entire oeuvre, with its beautifully muffled oboe melody suggesting how beauty ripens in sleep like a chrysalis), is turned into an epic battle for the poor passive Prince, conducted between the wicked Carabosse, with her ghoulish minions, and the Lilac Fairy, with her elves. This is staged so that the directors seem to forget that it’s Aurora, not the Prince, who needs to be awakened and saved until mere seconds before the whole ballet’s climax. Bye-bye, Carabosse; hello, victorious Lilac; here’s the snoozing heroine; here’s the woken prince; kiss; hello darling; this must be love; rise and shine — all at pell-mell speed.

That episode proves what the rest of the production suggests: that Mr. McKenzie, Ms. Kirkland and Mr. Chernov are concerned not with revealing Tchaikovsky’s music but merely with using it to their own dramatic ends. Yet that could be O.K. if they were choreographing the ballet from scratch as well as retelling it. This production doesn’t make the story boring, as some have done; in a Disneyesque way, this story has some tension and certainly surprise. Its problem is that these directors have saddled themselves with extensive chapters of the old choreography.

Marius Petipa’s dances for the 1890 original are the climax of 19th-century ballet classicism, marrying royalist ceremony to fairy-tale beauty with the same fluency with which Homer interweaves the actions of mortal heroes and immortal gods in “The Iliad.” Their classicism isn’t just a matter of step-by-style manner but of structural connections, so that the ballet has long been viewed as the prototype of modern theme-and-variations ballets, with the fairy godmothers bringing a long glimpse of paradise into the human world, a paradise from which Aurora seems to draw in her later dances. We can even hear how Tchaikovsky hints that the awakened Aurora dances in her final solo to the staccato rhythms of the malign Carabosse, so that she now seems, at her wedding, like a woman who has tasted of the fruit of both good and evil.

But Mr. McKenzie, Ms. Kirkland and Mr. Chernov give us merely a soloist’s view of Petipa’s choreography — take this bit from that Kirov video and that bit from the Royal Ballet’s — with no sense of its overall architecture. In the Prologue all six fairy solo variations have been carefully studied. But their ensemble passages, which can be the most transcendent sequences of the ballet, are a mishmash. Aurora’s dances at her Act I birthday, in the Act II Vision and in the Act II Wedding have been assembled in mix-and-match fashion without being staged as part of a cumulative, classical whole.

This is scarcely a production for purists. Claiming to be “inspired” by Konstantin Sergeyev’s 1952 staging for the Kirov, it sees fit to lift his version of Aurora’s Vision solo wholesale. No inspiration is cited for its liberal quotations from Frederick Ashton’s supplementary dances.

It is a safe bet that the production will look better at later performances. I don’t, however, envy Ms. Kirkland, returning to the stage tonight after more than 20 years, having to tackle this version of Carabosse; the great mime role has been reduced to standard old ham, which not even Martine van Hamel can make interesting.

I have never seen Veronika Part look better than her opening-night Aurora, but she’s still a bore. A handsome, tall woman, she wears the same air of terminal nobility from first to last, apart from her irksome habit of letting her audience know which bits she finds difficult. Even when she’s on the music, she doesn’t seem to know why. She seems temperamentally wrong for Aurora, as does Michele Wiles as the Lilac Fairy, a role that needs a generosity that must encompass the whole world onstage.

Since the marvelous Herman Cornejo is prevented by text and costume from being the definitive Bluebird he could be, the best dance moments are some patches of fairly standard virtuosity for Marcelo Gomes as the Prince. Apart from the general virile ardor of his style (which has yet to be ideally showcased), his musical timing is a distinct pleasure when the production allows it to be.

Despite a recalcitrant horn section, Ormsby Wilkins conducted with showbiz vitality but less impact than one would have hoped. At no point is this a staging concerned with drawing its audience into the inexhaustible variety or even the knockout theatricality of Tchaikovsky’s score.

@New York Times, 2007