The New York City Ballet production of “Swan Lake,” shaped by the company’s artistic director, Peter Martins, in the 1990s, is no simple experience. Especially as performed on Tuesday, it keeps tugging its audience in different directions. The designs by Per Kirkeby turn it into a pencil cartoon sketch of “The ‘Swan Lake’ Show” that’s then been daubed by a paint-by-numbers beginners’ class: the prince is all blue, the villagers are green, the jester orange and so on. Tchaikovsky’s tempos are taken at a terrific lick: no Romantic lingerings here. Often the music — Andrews Sill conducted the company’s orchestra on Tuesday — rushes past without deepening the action; yet in some central passages we’re swept urgently into its vortex.
The secondary characters are tiresome. Queen Victoria complained of Gladstone, as prime minister, “He speaks to me as if I were a public meeting”; here, however, the Queen (Gwyneth Muller on Tuesday) in vast mime gestures that suggests she thinks he is a very public meeting indeed. The Jester (Daniel Ulbricht), though a prodigy of speed, is completely unfunny. The evil sorcerer von Rotbart (Silas Farley), who controls the enchanted swan-maidens and their queen, Odette, is an absurd caricature devil; the lining of his cloak — the brightest fabric of the whole show — is hell-flame orange.
The dancing falls into two main categories — brisk, efficient but flippantly inconsequential or brisk, impetuous, eloquent and compelling. Fortunately, Sara Mearns is rivetingly immediate as both the heroine Odette and the look-alike antiheroine Odile. She dances the role as if living the story for the first time, and, as she burns her way through it, you can’t take your eyes off her. As each phrase of her music arrives, she’s already there on top of it — as if it illustrates her rather than the reverse. In the first lakeside scene, the corps of swan-maidens dances that way too: firm and highly three-dimensional.
While Jared Angle, as Prince Siegfried, dances in a simpler style, it’s elegant and full. The carriage of his head, the focus of his address to other characters, the firmness of his phrasing all give the drama real seriousness; and he’s a superb partner.
But when Erica Pereira, Brittany Pollack and Anthony Huxley rattle their way nimbly through the steps of the Act I pas de trois (an over-embellished version of Marius Petipa’s 1895 St. Petersburg version), and when Megan Fairchild, Tiler Peck, Abi Stafford and Joaquin de Luz prattle through the top-speed nonsense of Mr. Martins’s Act II palace pas de quatre, it’s like hearing Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs without the humor. Only Mr. Huxley and, especially, Mr. de Luz manage to retain elegance; the women are made to look accomplished and silly at the same time. The waste of the phenomenal Ms. Peck in this taxing but trifling role is especially disgraceful; yet hers is merely the worst case of Mr. Martins’s fondness for trivializing women with obstacle-course choreography.Continue reading the main story
Thus aspects of the “Swan Lake” story are turned inside-out. In the traditional version, the still part-adolescent Siegfried rebels against the constrictions of grown-up court decorum; here Mr. Angle seems the only reasonable and three-dimensional adult onstage until he meets Ms. Mearns by the lakeside. Back in the palace, his dreadful mother tries to fob him off with a choice of six uniformly vapid but pushy princesses; when Ms. Mearns turns up, this time in a black tutu, his attraction to her seems entirely a meeting of serious minds amid a gathering of ninnies.
This really isn’t the fault of any dancer. City Ballet’s performers on Tuesday made the best case for this problematic production that I’ve experienced; their alertness of rhythm was a special pleasure. But most of what they’re dancing is Martins choreography, which squanders them. When the women of the first court scene extend arms and one leg behind them in arabesque, the image has no linear point.
Then, when Ms. Mearns dances — most of her choreography is by Petipa, Lev Ivanov and George Balanchine — the line of each outstretched limb knows precisely which star in the firmament it will reach. Simply, inevitably, her dancing shows us the full amplitude of ballet; and the art form again becomes something of great consequence. In the palace ballroom it was good to see a few dancers — notably the ever-improving Savannah Lowery in the Hungarian Dance — bring real force to their material.
As the heartbroken Odette in the final scene, Ms. Mearns even reveals value in Mr. Martins’s choreography. The vulnerability with which she returns to folded-over swan imagery, as if returning to her nest, and the tragic poignancy with which she invests each phrase are both superb.
Still, Mr. Martins wrecks the start of this scene by giving us irrelevant pranks by the Jester. And in the conclusion, Odette and Siegfried defeat von Rotbart without themselves meeting death. But then Odette still withdraws forever from Siegfried because he broke his vow to her. Perhaps Balanchine might have brought this off; but he would have done so with a piercing image of dance-drama. The astounding end of his “Divertimento From ‘Le Baiser de la Fée’ ” comes to mind. Mr. Martins, instead, reverts to mere Romantic-ballet formula, with the corps screening Odette’s exit and barring Siegfried’s effort to pursue her.
That isn’t this production’s only lame episode. The palace scene features a foolish dance (to the start of this ballet’s mazurka) while Siegfried plots his betrothal to the wrong heroine, Odile; then, clumsily, the score cuts to the last section of Tchaikovsky’s action music.
Is it just stubbornness that makes Mr. Martins keep reviving his “Swan Lake” without trying to improve its more obviously weak patches? He knows well how Balanchine went on reworking ballets. And Mr. Martins’s dogged persistence in making no changes to flawed productions keeps his whole company in a state of perpetually interrupted development.Continue reading the main story