Dance historians are forever calling “The Sleeping Beauty” the pinnacle of 19th-century classical ballet, citing the Tchaikovsky score, the sumptuous royal setting, the glittering choreography and a fairy tale describing the triumph of good over evil. For many a 20th-century audience member, however, “Sleeping Beauty” is an endurance test. Four acts’ worth of bustling courtiers, roistering peasants and frolicking nobility can wear down even the most diligent balletomane, and the notion of a 16-year-old girl condemned to slumber until a man wakes her up to womanhood lost its charm decades ago. Most important, “Sleeping Beauty” demands a whole company of storytellers if the ballet is to have any magic at all, and storytelling in dance is a lost skill nowadays. The arts of mime and acting have all but disappeared in favor of training dancers to move ever faster, kick ever higher and look ever skinnier.
Nonetheless, at least one “Sleeping Beauty” has been eagerly awaited for years, and the New York City Ballet unveiled it late last month at New York’s Lincoln Center. George Balanchine, who founded the company with his visionary colleague Lincoln Kirstein, talked often about his desire to stage a “Sleeping Beauty” that would be as resplendent as the production he knew back in St. Petersburg but geared to American tastes and American dancers. Eight years after his death, his successor Peter Martins has created a “Sleeping Beauty” in homage to his mentor and as a tribute to Kirstein, now the company’s general director emeritus.
Yes, it’s resplendent-for $2.8 million, with sets and costumes by the Broadway designers David Mitchell and Patricia Zipprodt respectively, it ought to be. More remarkably, Martins has streamlined the ballet: he has cut and trimmed so skillfully it’s now an efficient two acts, with Petipa’s beloved choreography at the center of the action, looking fresh and handsome. At the same time, perhaps inevitably, Martins has sliced out the emotional core of the ballet.
Audiences go to fairy-tale ballets like “Sleeping Beauty” because they take us on an adventure and return us home changed-and happier. It’s a childhood experience, one that depends on the ballet’s power to draw us into the story. In Martins’s version there is almost no acting, and the mime has been reduced to such bare-bones passages as the exchange between the Lilac Fairy and the prince (Kyra Nichols and Ben Huys on opening night): “You look sad.” “I am sad.” “Want to meet someone?” “She’s beautiful!” Once you eliminate the elements extraneous to pure dancing, what’s left is the NYCB wearing a lot of costumes. That’s not bad-with Nichols as the Lilac Fairy and Darci Kistler as Aurora, this is probably the best-danced “Sleeping Beauty” in decades. But it’s not transporting.
Martins does offer a glimpse of what a “Sleeping Beauty” both brisk and magical might be in his concept of Carabosse, the evil fairy who casts a spell on Aurora. As Merrill Ashley plays the part, Carabosse is all fire and glare, tearing around the stage terrorizing the courtiers without a wasted gesture. It’s only one passage in a busy evening, but it’s the one we remember-it’s the one that makes us make believe.
