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Boston Ballet looks to the past — and the future
BY JEFFREY GANTZ
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Don Quixote
Choreography by Rudolf Nureyev. Music by Ludwig Minkus, arranged by John Lanchbery. Sets and costumes by Nicholas Georgiadis. Lighting by Pierre Lavoie. With the Boston Ballet Orchestra directed by Jonathan McPhee. Presented by Boston Ballet at the Wang Theatre October 30 through November 2.
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Boston Ballet, which turns 40 this year, reached the turning point in its history so far back in March 1982, when the storied Rudolf Nureyev set his version of the classic Don Quixote on the company and danced the lead male role of Basilio himself. Just turned 44, Nureyev was no longer capable of the virtuosity that had made him the world’s most famous male ballet star, but his name and his presence on the production’s tour of the US and Mexico that followed put Boston on the international dance map. When Bruce Marks took over the company at the beginning of the 1985-’86 season, Nureyev’s Don Quixote was his first production. Yet when the ballet was brought back for productions in 1989, 1993, and 2000, we saw the more standard version, one that goes back to Marius Petipa’s 1869 staging for the Bolshoi as revised in 1902 by Aleksandr Gorsky; it’s also the version that American Ballet Theatre performed in New York this past June. For Boston Ballet’s season opener, to mark both Nureyev’s contribution to the company and the 10th anniversary of his death, artistic director Mikko Nissinen has revived his Don Quixote. It’s a nice gesture, but the moral may be that the company’s future doesn’t lie in looking back: this production is much more notable for the new dancers Nissinen has brought into Boston Ballet than it is for the merits of Nureyev’s version. Any staging of Don Quixote presents a problem: of all the classical story ballets in the repertoire, this one has the most perfunctory plot and the shallowest characterizations. Barcelona (in most versions) innkeeper’s daughter Kitri wants to marry the handsome barber Basilio, but her father, Lorenzo, has picked out for her the old-but-rich dandy Gamache. Taking advantage of the hubbub caused by the arrival of Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza, the lovers flee the city and take refuge with Gypsies, disguising themselves; Lorenzo, Gamache, Don Quixote, and Sancho follow, and after his abortive tilt at the windmill, Don Quixote has a vision of his beloved Dulcinea in the company of Amour and the Queen of the Dryads. Everyone’s next stop is a tavern, where a despairing Basilio "stabs" himself (with a straight-edge razor!) and Don Quixote compels Lorenzo to let his daughter marry her dying lover — whereupon Basilio springs back to perfect health and the nuptials are celebrated before our hero continues with his quest. At least, that’s the idea, but in every production I’ve seen Basilio pretends to be dead rather than dying, so it’s never clear why Kitri would be allowed to marry him. As for characterization, Don Quixote is hardly more substantial than the shadow of himself that he tries to fight in his study; farmer-turned-squire Sancho Panza is a Friar Tuck–like monk, all stomach; Gamache is all fop; and Lorenzo is all demanding dad. Apart from a spat in the first act when Don Quixote kisses Kitri’s hand and Basilio flirts with one of Kitri’s friends, the course of true love runs all too smooth. And none of the numerous secondary characters — Kitri’s two friends, the toreador Espada, the Street Dancer (sometimes called Mercedes), the Gitan (sometimes called the Gypsy Boy), the Maid of Honor — is integrated into the story. At the outset of the current production, it seems there’ll be something on between Espada and the Street Dancer, but at the tavern they ignore each other, and at the end she’s dancing with the Maid of Honor while he takes up with one of Kitri’s friends. Nissinen’s stated plan for this Don Quixote was to play down the pratfalls and give the story characters — Quixote, Sancho, Lorenzo, and Gamache — some dignity, and in that he’s succeeded, but if they’re all less silly, they’re still ciphers. And Nureyev’s choreography, here as in his Romeo and Juliet, tends to the fussy and the immature, with attempted pyrotechnics that register instead as poses and not much sense of continuity. The latter problem is echoed in the blank curtain that confronts the audience between the prologue and the first act as the scene shifts from Don Quixote’s castle to a Barcelona marketplace, and the 30 seconds of dead silence between Basilio’s act-one solo and his trio with Kitri’s friends. All too often the music will stop as the dancers complete a movement, then blast out a final chord as they snap into dramatic focus. Nicholas Georgiadis’s set comprises a dusty, faded study/bedroom for Don Quixote, with an ornate throne chair and chest; a bustling marketplace with two massive towers surmounted by cannons and vegetables, flowers, plants, brooms, and birds all for sale; a Gypsy camp with one huge windmill and another suggested by the rigging overhead; a Dryad garden (the scene of Don Quixote’s vision) that looks to have been inspired by Aubrey Beardsley; a midday-sun tavern studded with bullfighting posters; and a wedding tableau of Gypsy wagons against a mottled-red sky. His costume design sets the orange-and-green of the Barcelona fishermen (and later the Gypsies) against the gold and black of the matadors; the Dryads with Amour and Dulcinea are a study in subtle contrasts of cream with green and gold accents, but at the Gypsy camp Basilio’s false beard and Kitri’s veil make them look like the Mennonite and the Muslim (Nureyev’s parents were in fact Muslim Tatars), and Kitri’s bridesmaids sem to have flown in from Kraków. Ludwig Minkus’s functional but engaging score, as arranged by John Lanchbery, gets a splashy but classy realization from Jonathan McPhee and the Boston Ballet Orchestra: rich instrumental colors within a disciplined framework of tempo and phrasing. It’s the dancers, however, that make Don Quixote (as they do most ballets), and it’s the new dancers that will make or break Boston Ballet over the next few years. Last weekend, most of these arrivals looked like makers. New principal Lorna Feijóo is an aristocratic Kitri/Dulcinea with both attitude and technique. If she appeared a tad awkward at times, that was, I think, the laudable result of honoring the letter of Nureyev’s choreography. Dulcinea’s beats while traveling on pointe became child’s play; so did Kitri’s climactic series of fouettés, Feijóo looking as if she could toss off them while reading the New Yorker. Yury Yanowsky’s Basilio was focused and intense; Yanowsky doesn’t have the nippy, even precious, technique that Nureyev calls for, but like Feijóo he dug down to make the steps work, and his climactic tours à la seconde were powerful and perpendicular. Both Yanowsky and Feijóo danced with Ballet Nacional de Cuba (though not together), and one assumes Nissinen will put them together again — it’s hard to see why he wouldn’t. Friday night, Pollyana Ribeiro and guest artist José Manuel Carreño (from ABT — you may remember him from the PBS documentary Born To Be Wild: The Men of American Ballet Theatre) were softer and more idiosyncratic leads. Carreño makes it look easy: everything he does has ballon, and there’s a casual (as opposed to Yanowsky’s nervous) intensity about him. He gives the impression he could do more; occasionally I was left to wish that he would. Ribeiro is an explosion of sensibility: during the first-act minuet that Kitri dances with Don Quixote, she never took her eyes off Basilio, who was partnering one of Kitri’s friends, and in the third-act quintet with Basilio, Espada, and Kitri’s friends, her shimmy would make sister Kate jealous. She’s such a joy to watch, you hardly care that the choreography is personalized, but she did seem a little fuzzy in Feijóo’s wake (or did Carreño set the tenor for the partnership?). This Dulcinea’s traveling beats didn’t always travel; as Kitri, on the other hand, Ribeiro was unexceptionable standing unsupported on pointe and in her fouettés. Saturday afternoon, Larissa Ponomarenko and new soloist Nelson Madrigal didn’t quite jell. Ponomarenko was sidelined most of last season with a bad back; in her first performance of 2003, she was a shade detached, elegant but without her usual élan, and no wonder. Madrigal was as easy-going as Carreño but without the suggestion of something in reserve; he has technique and an agreeable bearing, but he doesn’t smolder and he never looked to be the right partner for Ponomarenko. (Nissinen’s plan may have been to pair her with new principal Roman Rykine, but he’s still not recovered from the Achilles’ tendon injury that kept him out all last season.) Madrigal did the best job of clarifying Basilio’s fake-suicide scheme; he faded at the end, however, seeming winded in his wedding pas de deux barrel turns and not quite keeping his leg up in his seconde tours. Madrigal’s Espada likewise evinced a boyish bravura, but he wasn’t kindled by his incendiary Street Dancer, slinky Sarah Lamb, whose superb bearing and articulation showed in the way she bent when she circled him in their third-act duet and in her perfectly straight arms and 90-degree wrist bend during the group prance that followed. As the Queen of the Dryads, Lamb made a tender moment out of leading Don Quixote; she executed huge split jetées, and if her Italian fouettés were a hair tentative, they were nonetheless far steadier than Carmen Corella’s for ABT. In the same role, new soloist Barbora Kohoutková balanced between precise and pleasing, with a welcome suspension in her phrasing. Her Street Dancer was marred by an unlucky fall after stepping on Espada’s cape, but she pulled herself together, and her performance suffered only by comparison with Lamb’s. Ponomarenko’s Queen of the Dryads was regal and reliable; Melanie Atkins’s Street Dancer was teasing where Lamb was sultry, and as one of Kitri’s friends opening night she made a major event out of her flirting with Basilio. As Gitan, new soloist Michael Cusumano contributed a sensational manège of Russian squat kicks; as Sancho Panza, he was Woody Allen–humble, a refreshing novelty. New soloist Pavel Gurevich’s Espada struck some sparks, but not with his Street Dancer, Kohoutková; the similar lack of chemistry between Atkins and her Espada, Miao Zong, suggests the choreography might need tweaking. Other noteworthy performances included Rob Moore’s chivalrous, large-scaled Quixote; Viktor Plotnikov’s ultimately good-hearted Lorenzo (opposite Ponomarenko, his real-life wife, as Kitri); Jared Redick’s poignant Gamache; Romi Beppu’s exquisitely detailed Amour; new corps member Kathleen Breen Combes’s effervescent Maid of Honor; and the uncredited dancer who portrays the front half of Don Quixote’s noble (though here hardly undernourished) steed Rocinante. The choice of version aside, this Don Quixote holds its own against ABT’s, and the new dancers have made a good first impression. This weekend, Boston Ballet will be doing George Balanchine’s Mozartiana and Stars and Stripes and David Dawson’s new The Grey Area; the Balanchine, at least, will invite comparisons with New York City Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet’s program earlier this month. Don Quixote will return for a final weekend October 30 through November 2, at which time outgoing principal Jennifer Gelfand will dance Kitri/Dulcinea in her final performances with the company (October 30 and November 1 evening) and we’ll see how Boston Ballet’s future stacks up against its past.
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