BWW Reviews: American Ballet Theatre's SWAN LAKE Offers Delights and Disappointments

Even the world of ballet has its summer blockbusters. While everyone else has been lining up for Star Trek Into Darkness and Man of Steel, dance aficionados have flocked to the American Ballet Theatre's current rendition of Swan Lake-a rendition that bombards its audience with lavish production values and with Kevin McKenzie's show-stopping choreography. What's more, this version is being staged in the Metropolitan Opera House, one of the few performance spaces in NY that makes the palatial David H. Koch Theater feel humble. This is classical ballet as grand spectacle, but also as spectator sport. At the performance I attended, there were plenty of times when Swan Lake sacrificed narrative momentum for the sake of taxing solos, intricate ensemble pieces, and other feats of mind-boggling physical coordination. Much applause; many cries of "brava!" and "bravo!"

With all those "bravos!" and all that applause, you would never guess that the critics have given drubbing after drubbing to this version of Swan Lake. And as often happens with a blockbuster, you might be so overwhelmed while watching it that you don't pick up on the artistic flaws and lapses in taste that would quickly get on your nerves in a less spectacular piece. There are kinks and oddities that, for whatever reason, haven't been refined out of existence since this version premiered in 2000. These are quibbles; the bigger problem is how easily this production plays into the most unfortunate notions that surround Swan Lake itself. In the realm of dance, Swan Lake occupies the kind of place that Pride and Prejudice occupies in the realm of literature-held up as a prim and pointless display of technique, subjected to endless riffs and parodies, but actually smart and challenging in ways that the detractors always overlook. There is an unruly, beautiful tangle of interpretive possibilities beneath the surface of Swan Lake, and the ABT production doesn't unearth any of them. It's all surface, all dazzling, melodramatic surface. Surface isn't enough.

The synopsis of Swan Lake is fairly simple: "Odette, a beautiful princess, falls under the spell of von Rothbart, a wicked sorcerer." Odette's best hope for salvation is Prince Siegfried, a young man who has to balance his recently-discovered dedication to Odette against his "royal obligation to wed." Though the ABT efficiently lays all this out in the Early Stages of Swan Lake, the production doesn't settle on a dominant mood during its first few acts. The Prologue, which shows Odette's transformation, is all creepy menace. Act I focuses on Siegfried and his friends and is mostly pleasantry blown to ensemble-piece proportions, with a few halfhearted hints of melancholy. And Act II gives us Odette (a nicely calibrated performance by Veronika Part), her retinue of swans (again, nicely calibrated), and von Rothbart slinking around behind some rocks and blasted trees.

This "some of everything" approach also appears to guide Zack Brown's costumes and scenery, which abound in intriguing, achingly underdeveloped motifs. For instance, the royal portico in Act I: is it meant to recall an 18th-century neoclassical painting? Or the nighttime scenery in Act II: a landscape by Caspar David Friedrich? Why is the Prince's Tutor dressed like a figure out of Rembrandt, while the Queen looks just like Elizabeth I? And why on earth does the Great Hall in Act III look like something from The Arabian Nights?

These various touches eventually blend together into a big, broad, visually pleasing wash of opulence and extravagance. But the dancers should be drawing attention away from all this-should enthrall your emotions, and keep your eyes from wandering-and yet, my attention kept reverting to the stage properties. (That background in Act I, was it perhaps inspired by a Puvis de Chavannes landscape? Okay, now I'm done.) Prince Siegfried, for one, can be played as a likable young man in over his head, or as a libertine who finds a sense of purpose, or as a hero with some tragic blind spots. ABT principal Cory Stearns plays him mostly as a well-regulated dancing machine. Yet what would Sascha Radetsky (cast here as Siegfried's friend Benno) have done as the Prince himself? Radetsky isn't as statuesque or conventionally handsome as Stearns, but he's something better-he's genuinely fun to watch.

While the depiction of Prince Siegfried is rather flat, the treatment of von Rothbart is the absolute low point of this Swan Lake. This isn't the fault of Roman Zhurbin, whose take on the sorcerer can be muscular and kinetic in all the right ways. It's the fault of Zhurbin's costume, a mold-green getup that the ABT must have gotten on loan from Spiderman: Turn off the Dark. This von Rothbart is a stage villain, nothing more, and the more human incarnation that we get in Act III (Ivan Vasiliev, playing the sorcerer as a leering sexpot) isn't an improvement. But try re-imagining von Rothbart as a tormented, Faustian, almost-but-not-quite human figure: a character who has more in common with his not-quite-human victims that you might assume. Imagine him in white. A von Rothbart in thrall to his own evil, whose own fate has a tragic tinge: now that would be a blockbuster-grade villain.

With this production, though, it's hard even to feel for Odette's tragedy. As the Swan Princess, Veronika Part is wise enough not to try for too much emotional range. (When she dances as Odette, her face becomes a mask of anguish. And in Act III, when she dances as Odette's BLACK SWAN doppelganger, she fills the stage with smiling deviousness.) Odette can work brilliantly as an icon of beauty and innocence, a point of epic contention between Siegfried and von Rothbart-though only if Siegfried, von Rothbart, and their conflict are worth taking seriously. An archetypal character surrounded by high stakes and human drama can break your heart, but an archetypal character surrounded by cartoon characters can't.

To post a comment, you must register and login.