BWW Reviews: Houston Ballet's Dreamy A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

It's a simple, classic tale. Girl meets Boy. Boy meets Girl. They - Boy and Girl - fall in love. Another Boy loves Girl. (The plot thickens.) Girl Two enters the story and she loves Another Boy. (I've tasted the plot. It needs butter.) Then enters the king and queen of the fairies and their loveable trickster. (Just a little more salt.) Then a troupe of hobo actors. (Too much salt. Too much salt!) Did I mention the love potion? Maybe, I need to consult the recipe before we go any further.

OK, so it's not so simple. But, it is classic and timeless.

Four lovers enter the woods searching for love. And, because the bard is the bard, they find it and live happily ever after once - again, because the bard is the bard - they endure a series of hilarious mix-ups.

Despite loving the A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM narrative wherever it may lay - theatre stage, soundstage, or the page - Houston Ballet's production of John Neumeier's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM concerned me. For one, it's a ballet - well, a narrative ballet, but still a ballet - of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM with a run time of two and a half hours. When I added this information to the internet whispers accusing choreographer John Neumeier of making changes to the, in my eyes, inviolate Shakespearean text, I started to suspect that one of my favorite stories would be destroyed in front of my own eyes. This is a completely reasonable reaction. Ask any J.R.R. Tolkien or Star Wars fan.

I was pleasantly surprised. The Houston Ballet serves a full course of dazzlement with no disappointment in sight.

John Neumeier's choreography is indulgent but, I think, justified. Why shouldn't the last act be full of gratuitous dances? This is a ballet, not the play. More impressively, one would expect chaos from a nearly three hour ballet that spans a variety of dance and musical styles. But, it is those very same dance varieties that create the ballet's narrative structure.

Sara Webb portrays a confident and powerful Hippolyta with ease and Jim Nowakowski's Puck is sinewy and silly in Neumeier's neoclassical dance steps. Two of my favorite moments in the ballet stem from Sara Webb's performance. At the start of the play, she performs a wounded, gliding pas de bourrée couru away from her unfaithful fiance, Theseus. By the end of the play, when the couple has renewed their love, she performs a pas de bourree couru toward her lover. Simple movement, but, then again, she is living in a simple and conventional world.

Supported by György Ligeti's eerie Volumina, the futuristic and alienesque fairy world is delineated with modern and contemporary movement. It's unsettling, unconcerned with smooth movement and the plans of mere mortals.

The final world, and the world the audience will likely find themselves most comfortable in, is that of the mechanicals. The most familiar movements come from the carnivalesque craftsman whose vaudevillian inspired delights are accompanied by barrel organ.

Despite being such a large-scale affair, the production is judicious - gratuitous in some places and measured in others. Costume and set designer Jurgen Rose's economical set design and luminous costumes are partly responsible for this. In the scenes at court, the set is bare but the costumes and props - Hippolyta's bed and long train for her wedding dress - provide the opulence and majesty of a 19th century royal court. The same is true in the fairy world. The set is more embellished here than in the scenes at court, with bright lights shimmering among modernist trees, but the true focus is the silver bodysuits fitted to the dancers' bodies.

The ballet ends on a high note. My usual gripe with the narrative is that any scene sans fairy is just uninteresting, but I found myself rapt with attention during the wedding. It's a beautiful scene - all white with specks of red.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM is a fun comedy of errors that pleases but doesn't pander and begs the question: if four teenagers go into the woods for love and find feuding fairies, was it all a dream?

You may have missed the dream (maybe put in less hours at work?) but Houston Ballet's fall mixed repertory program FROM HOUSTON TO THE WORLD is coming this weekend!

FROM HOUSTON TO THE WORLD showcases three works that were created for Houston Ballet:

Edwaard Liang's Murmuration, inspired by video of flocks of birds flying in breathtaking unison in the skies of Northern Europe, is a deeply spiritual work for eight couples and one male dancer. Finnish choreographer Jorma Elo's ONE/end/ONE brings wit and humor to the extreme technical virtuosity that he demands of the four women and four men featured in ONE/end/ONE. A highpoint of the program will be a performance of the dazzling third act of Paquita, the Spanish-flavored classical showpiece that Stanton Welch staged for Houston Ballet in 2013.

Performances are at 7:30 pm on September 18, 20, 26, 27, 2014 and 2:00 pm on September 21, 28, 2014. For more information, please visit Houston Ballet online at www.houstonballet.org.

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