Word: ballets
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...PROBLEM of a ballet such as Sleeping Beauty is not to make the audience believe the fantasy, but to make us not mind that we don't believe it. The dancing doesn't have to carry it alone--after all, this pull-out-all-the-stops Imperial Russian classic, complete with Tchaikovsky score and choreography by the legendary Marius Petipa, is nothing if not an occasion for bravura theatrical spectacle. The dance comes like expensive chocolates wrapped in gold foil: we're supposed to enjoy the package almost as much as the contents...
...sheer spectacle, the Boston Ballet's third annual Sleeping Beauty, which closed last night, succeeded lusciously. Peter Farmer decked out the Fairies in stained-glass blues and greens, as peasants and the Prince's hunting party cavorted in the golds and reds of a New England autumn, and the courtiers looked as though they'd just stepped off a wedding cake, with popsicle-orange feathers bobbing on their bewigged heads. And the decor, especially in the second act, atoned for a flock of balletic bumbles. The ingenious use of layered, semi-transparent drop scrims melted the bright grove...
Whatever the reason, the Boston Ballet falls short too much of the time. At worst, the edges were fuzzy, like a photograph out of focus--one dancer among several off the music by a glaring beat or two, four dancers in a line with legs extended at four different levels. More often, what was missing was not so much technique as imaginative energy. Nothing in particular distinguished several perfectly competent dancers in the first act from perfectly competent performers in any of a dozen other balletic roles. If anyone knew they were the gift-bearing Fairies, it was thanks...
Bauer's role in Sleeping Beauty includes one of the most infernally difficult sequences in the classical repertoire, the so-called Rose Adagio. It is a moment of psychological depth that is rare in 19th-century ballet. The princess stands poised on her 16th birthday between childhood and adulthood, between the parents whose presence she acknowledges reverently and the four suitors who dance with her in turn, between the festive court around her and the unfolding self-awareness within. Twice during the course of the Adagio, the ballerina must balance on one pointed toe for several minutes as she takes...
David Brown's role as the Prince suffers from the usual handicaps of male leads in traditional ballet--most of the time he was little more than a supportive ornament to his ballerina, sort of a graceful coat-rack. That is no excuse for laziness, however, especially during his own solos. Brown has considerable strength, but instead of the effortlessness of the great dancer he moved with an air of nonchalance, as though it really wasn't worth his while to exert much energy or to smooth out the rough edges in his technique...