Le Corsaire (American Ballet Theatre)

After their theatrical but unemotional "Swan Lake" the American Ballet Theatre have chosen to follow it with a show of pretty much the same quality. "Le Corsaire" is one of the supreme fluff ballets but the ABT don't give it even a modicum of respect preferring instead to see it as a vehicle for balletic fireworks. This approach is not without merit but it relies upon a group of dancers who truly have the abilities and not everyone at this performance did.

The production itself is disappointingly cheap looking. The last Corsaire to visit London was the absurdly grand Bolshoi production and visually this staging has nothing like the scale. The boat just looks cheap and the sets, especially in Act I, look like they've been ripped off from a bad Aladdin pantomime. The costumes are a definite step up, they've still a pantomime air to them (there's a strong pantomime feel throughout) but looked less tacky than the sets. The choreography is pretty straight of the line classical but the narrative sections are stripped down to bare necessities. It works in a very basic way but forget emotion. The pasha gets a few laughs, it's a witty caricature, but his assistant is just weird, I've no idea what his tomfoolery was supposed to be about.

Thankfully the dancing was a big step up from what I saw in Swan Lake. Herman Cornejo is an absolutely electric dancer. The big pas de deux was a succession of incredible leaps and turns. He managed a set of turns of near uncountable length and all delivered without wavering from the point he started at. Xiomara Reyes is a similarly exciting dancer although not quite as explosive. Jared Matthews was a pretty limp villain (despite being a terrifically nasty Rothbart last week) but has a way of attracting attention to his every step. Act I, which was generally the weakest, was given a real lift by his precise, emphatic dancing. Misty Copeland didn't particularly grip me; she got through the steps but without any finesse. The same could be said of Gennadi Saveliev who was completely danced off the stage by Cornejo. Mikhail Ilyin looked a little scrawny, especially next to the impossibly well built Cornejo, but he proved himself an explosively compact dancer, and produced a little drama as well. The female corps still failed to impress, more coherent here than in "Swan Lake" but with uneven leg lines and a general air of imprecision.

The American Ballet Theatre tour has been something of a damp squib. They have some amazing dancers, Cornejo is truly world class (and he's far from the only top grade dancer in the company), but the two productions have been disappointing and the corps nothing to shout home about. "Swan Lake" was a mess and this epic pantomime failed to fly because it had neither the emotional nor the theatrical elements to make a show interesting. It's not bad show, if you like mammoth leaps and endless turns then it's really quite a good show, but shallow would be an understatement. Hopefully we might see the return of the company with some more significant repertory (some Tudor ballets would be well appreciated) sometime in the future but considering how much money this tour must have lost, I'm not hopeful.