E-Mail This Article to a Friend Wit without wisdom James Kudelka’s Cinderella at Boston Ballet BY JEFFREY GANTZ
	CINDERELLA Music by Sergei Prokofiev | Choreography by James Kudelka | Sets and costumes by David Boechler | Lighting by Christopher Dennis | Presented by Boston Ballet at the Wang Theatre through October 23
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When it comes to Cinderella, Boston Ballet is Prince Charming standing with glass slipper in hand. In 1976, the company premiered resident choreographer Ron Cunningham’s version of Sergei Prokofiev’s 1945 ballet, with the stepsisters in drag (à la Frederick Ashton’s 1948 pathbreaker), unicorns pulling the coach, and a jester to accompany the Prince. Next up, in 1993, was Ben Stevenson: more drag, more jester pyrotechnics, and a breathtaking moment when Cinderella bourrées into the ballroom, but also PG choreography for R-rated music. Four years later, we got the American premiere of Michael Corder’s austere 1996 ballet: no drag, no jester, no bourrée entrance, only the moon as metaphor for the waxing and waning of dreams. Our current candidate, also in its American premiere, is the 2004 version that James Kudelka did for the National Ballet of Canada. Inspired by Art Deco and Erté and set in the ’20s, it’s no Bigfoot, but it doesn’t quite fill the slipper either.

Not that Cinderella is an easy fit. The story, adapted from Charles Perrault’s 1698 collection of fairy tales, is stepsister to the more complex psychodramas of Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty and even Giselle. The score, though steeped in the harmonic language of Prokofiev’s 1935 Romeo and Juliet (with a pointed quote from the composer’s The Love for Three Oranges, though productions that, like this one, omit the oranges miss the point), is darker and more sardonic, with a series of bittersweet erotic waltzes that threaten to burst open like an overripe pumpkin. It’s nightmare music (here given a nightmarishly apt performance by Jonathan McPhee and the Boston Ballet Orchestra) for a fractured fairy tale.

Like Corder, Kudelka grounds his ballet in an organic symbol of growth and decay. In his case, it’s the pumpkin: Cinderella floats down into the ballroom, among pumpkin-colored Japanese lanterns, in a glowing pumpkin bower, yet it’s pumpkin-headed men in tuxes who form a circle and pop up one by one to represent the clock’s moving toward and striking midnight. Kudelka, however, forgoes myth and magic and turns Cinderella into a morality play. The curtain rises on a higgledy-piggledy but cozy superfluity of kitchen hutches and breakfronts that dwarf our heroine. Stepmom is a chainsmoking dipso in a Day-Glo dressing gown who stumbles into the kitchen in search of a snort with scarcely a glance at Cinderella; the stepsisters haze her the way the Siamese cats do Lady in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, but mostly they’re too taken with themselves to bother. Her father, whose failure to stick up for his daughter adds to her pain, is absent in this version; so is the scene where Cinderella defies her step-relatives and gives her last crust of bread to a beggar woman who turns out to be you-know-who. Here the Fairy Godmother, fashionably dressed, emerges from the hearth and Cinderella pours her a cup of tea.

All the misery is tamped down — Cinderella even enjoys a makeover from the dressmaker and his entourage while the dancing instructor is putting the stepsisters through their gavotte paces. Instead of the four seasons, we have "Blossom," "Petal," "Moss," and "Twig," who bring Cinderella her pointe shoes and teach her to dance. And though Kudelka is all ingenuity and invention in the ballroom, threading a flashbulb-popping "Photo Journalist" through the glitterati and hinting at mambos and tangos and charlestons in Prokofiev’s big mazurka, he has Cinderella and Prince Charming turn their backs on this empty spectacle. There’s no audience: no one really notices (except their embarrassed escorts) when the stepsisters throw themselves at the Prince, the stepsisters don’t notice Cinderella at all (and their mother has stayed home), and she and the Prince dance out their big duet in solitude. In act three, the Prince’s globetrotting reminds us how unreal glass slippers are in a world of skis and snowshoes and skates and wooden clogs and sandals and bare feet; his voyage hits bottom when he starts to offer the shoe to a woman with one leg. He redeems himself by recognizing Cinderella in her kitchen rags; but then there’s another solitary pas de deux followed by a simple garden wedding, and the guests leave at once, allowing the couple to settle down before the hearth and, like Candide, tend their own garden.

Kudelka is nothing if not witty. In her kitchen, after exchanging sweet nothings with her dance-partner warming pan, Cinderella essays hopscotch as if it were a game of pas de chat and temps de poisson. His stepsisters — one marcelled, one myopic, call them Blondie and Blindie — are a riot of histrionics and off-kilter high jinks; Blindie gets a brush stuck in her hair, and when she sets her cap at the Prince, she vamps like an Egyptian. At the end of the mazurka, after the ladies have high-kicked off stage, the men all stand with hand to head, alluding to a characteristic mazurka gesture but also suggesting the divide between men and women. And every time the poor photographer tries to snap the Prince, he gets hustled away. This Cinderella is sly, seductive, and sometimes drop-dead funny. But what’s a wedding, even a simple one, without dancing? Or without guests who share in the newlyweds’ happiness? Ballet is about community, and this Cinderella is not.

Paired on Saturday afternoon last weekend, Romi Beppu and Nelson Madrigal found the most poetry in Kudelka’s gentle, tender duets and created the closest rapport. Beppu played Cinderella as a Disney heroine (Prokofiev in fact became a big Disney fan after seeing Snow White), over-articulating her movements and her facial expressions, finding wonder in everything. And though her her port de bras at the end of her second-act variation was weak, she whipped through her third-act straight-line fouetté sequence as if she were walking. Nelson Madrigal matched her childlike enthusiasm, though with less technical assurance. They missed at least one lift in their second-act duet, but it didn’t matter when they walked off like a couple from Balanchine’s Who Cares?

The opening-night Cinderella, Lorna Feijóo, was less abused daughter than hired help, J-Lo in Maid in Manhattan, with a wink to remind us that she was always in control. As her Prince, Carlos Molina was more convincing wooing than winning; he has amplitude (and, in a ballroom sequence with his officers, deep knee bends), but it didn’t always add up to achievement. Larissa Ponomarenko was touching and vulnerable on Friday but not fresh; she did her best work as a sophisticated lady in the ballroom, where her entrance would have done Audrey Hepburn proud. Her Prince, Roman Rykine, was technically correct but not inspiring, and there was no chemistry.

Heather Myers stole opening night as Blindie, an open-mouthed, over-the-top Valley Girl with no end of Lucille Ball antics; her Blondie, Sacha Wakelin, was muted to a fault, but the combination worked well. The other Blondies were more eye-catching, Kathleen Breen Combes as wanna-be movie star, Melanie Atkins as frustrated romantic heroine; the other Blindies, Melissa Hough and Tempe Ostergren, offered subtler shenanigans. Jennifer Glaze was the ditsy, depreciating stepmom; Rie Ichikawa, Ashley Blade-Martin, Combes, and Atkins were the most gratifying seasonal quartet, Atkins especially so in the panache of her piqué steps. The better comic turns, of which there were many, included Jared Redick’s fussbudget shoe salesman and Mindaugas Bauzys’s falling-out-of-the-car officer.

Yet the best characterization was provided by the company’s "Character Artist," Viktor Plotnikov, as the stogie-chomping photog, sashaying in and out of the picture as if he were Sam Spade and conjuring a weary Humphrey Bogart with almost no choreography. Ballet isn’t just about community, or even dancing; it’s about relationships. That’s why this Cinderella is a good first date but not happily ever after.