Swan Lake (American Ballet Theatre)

The first three minutes of the American Ballet Theatre's "Swan Lake" are (although some I have no doubt consider them sacrilege) brilliant. The addition of a brief prologue during the overture works impossibly well. For those few minutes I thought I was in for a treat; the gritty kidnap of Odette as a young girl, really creepy murder in a back alley overtones, with some slick lighting and terrific costuming makes for spellbinding theatre. It sets up Rothbart as a true fiend, far more substantial than the one that flounces about in most productions and gives the whole performance an emotional context that is usually missing. My hopes of an amazing show were soon dashed by Act I, but at least things started well.

Kevin McKenzie's production has some bright spots but in places but it often amounts to an unhappy marriage of old and new nowhere more so than in Act I. Gone are the attractive lines to be replaced by messy formations with dancers cluttered around the stage. The peasant dances just didn't look good. Things weren't helped by the apparent lack of rehearsal with dancers brushing into each other with alarming regularity (the stage might be on the small side for the production but their doing nearly a dozen shows so it's something they are going to have to cope with). The pas de trois remained intact and was decently danced, Hee Seo in particular put in some lovely work. Blaine Hoven looked fantastic on his own but his partnering left something to be desired, it appeared like he nearly pushed a poor girl over on an assisted turn. Regardless of the production quality things looked up with the stunning entry of Maxin Beloserkovsky who delivered some of the finest grand jetes I've seen, few dancers can appear to float so impressively (even fewer men). The usually charming maypole looked terrible thanks to a badly design top, something you'd think someone could fix.

The shift to Act II returned the company to safer ground with fewer McKenzie additions and the good, time old Petipa steps. The Cygnets offered a weird case of déjà vu with both Gemma Bond and Caroline Duprot dancing having recently jumped ship from the Royal Ballet. It was relatively neat work although they started badly with some mistimed legs. The entry of Irina Dvorovenko brought the realisation that this wasn't going to be a performance to test the tear ducts. She's a more than decent dancer but neither she nor, as it turned out, Beloserkovsky had much interest in creating characters. They spent more time in the Act II pas de deux looking at the audience than each other. Love was not exactly evident. The corps looked in better shape here though still some way off what I expected from one of the world's premier companies.

McKenzie's Act III has some impressive moments. Rothbart is given a passage in which he dances with the four princesses and it pretty much stole the show. Cory Stearns danced exceptionally well and he picked the women like a rapist picking his next target, it was truly chilling stuff. The various national dances were all solid enough; Patrick Ogle in particular looked like he was having a great time in the Czardas. The Spanish Dance suffered a little as the dancers seemed to be struggling to keep up with the breath neck pace Charles Barker decided to conduct it. The fireworks driven pas de deux was cleanly but unspectacularly danced by the two principals, Dvorovenko strung together a tidy set of single fouettes, which was good, but it was disappointing that she failed to properly complete the double at the end. Beloserkovsky didn't put a foot wrong but wasn't especially memorable, managing the steps without much flair (whatever happened to the sterling leaps of Act I, I'll never know). Both spent more time mugging at the audience that flirting with each other. The conclusion is very neatly staged, as with much of this production, the most theatrically exciting moments seemed to happen when no one was dancing much.

Act IV has been massively culled but it works well enough. This offered the strongest work from the corps and placed Rothbart centre stage which was ideal since he was the best thing in this (well the two of him at any rate). The requisite leaps came and went without much excitement, the reductions of the score make for a slightly abrupt finish but it's staged attractively enough. The designs are grand enough but curiously dull, a rather pallid colour palette reigns throughout. The costumes are very pretty, Rothbart looks a bit like Nite Owl from "The Watchmen" but that's not really a bad thing. Barker got a decent sound out of the English National Opera orchestra but there were too many fluffed notes in the brass.

I can't say I like this production. Despite the brilliant reinvention of Rothbart both in the prologue and Act III, there's too much mucking around generally, especially in Act I, the formations are just hideous, and Act IV which is unduly foreshortened. Neither of the principal pair truly impressed, neither danced badly but they never inhabited their roles (or even tried to do so). Nor did they have the technical fireworks to overcome this lack of emotional content and it just became flat. This was my first experience of the ABT and I can't say I'm overly impressed, the corps wasn't poor but wasn't world class by any stretch of the imagination either. I'll be catching another "Swan Lake" this weekend and then "Le Corsaire" next week so there's time for them to recover but this wasn't a good start. On an even more depressing note, even if they were world class they'll still be losing a boatload of money on this tour. The house was about fifty percent full which is more than a little sad (kind of their own damn fault for running "Swan Lake" at the same time as the Royal though).