Snake eyes

Cleopatra barely avoids making an asp of itself

by Jeffrey Gantz

CLEOPATRA, Choreography by Ben Stevenson. Music by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, arranged by John Lanchbery. Set by Thomas Boyd. Costumes by Judanna Lynn. Lighting by Timothy Hunter. Presented by Boston Ballet at the Wang Theatre, through May 21.

The good news is, this is no Dracula -- Boston Ballet has not resurrected last year's season-ending horror. Cleopatra has a coherent story line and real dancing, besides delivering on the promise of sumptuous costumes, sets, and music. The bad news is that it's still a second-rate ballet. There's actually too much story -- enough for three evening-length works. John Lanchbery's score, a Rimsky-Korsakov pastiche, is as sensuous and unmemorable as the Liszt pastiche he did for Dracula. And Ben Stevenson's choreography, with its flat Egyptian affect, is gimmicky and histrionic. The second pas de deux for Antony and Cleopatra begins to develop these characters; a few minutes later, they're both dead. No Dracula, then, but no Romeo and Juliet, either.

It's the concept that's cracked. "The most intriguing, tempestuous love triangle in history" -- as the company is hyping Cleopatra, Caesar, and Antony -- never existed: Caesar was dead before Antony came into the picture. (The two best theatrical treatments of Cleopatra, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, focus on one love story or the other; the 1963 cinematic Cleopatra, which nearly bankrupted Fox, has both, but it runs 243 minutes.) Stevenson might have chosen to disregard history and have Caesar and Antony compete for Cleopatra, but he didn't. He does telescope history by having the Battle of Actium (31 BC), in which Octavian defeats Antony and Cleopatra, follow directly upon the assassination of Caesar (44 BC); no harm in that, but when your ballet runs just 100 minutes, why waste the first 30 on a yet a third story, the cardboard love affair between 97-pound weakling Ptolemy XI (Cleopatra's brother and, in real life, her husband) and his hunky adviser Pothinus (in real life a eunuch)?

Alas, this entire ballet is cardboard. You could make a decent drama out of Cleopatra's political and emotional relationship with her brothers (after the real Ptolemy XII drowned -- accidentally? -- in the Nile, she married their younger brother, Ptolemy XIII) and then Caesar. You could have Cleopatra and Calpurnia (Caesar's wife) fighting over their man back in Rome. Or, as in Shakespeare, you could have Antony in Alexandria torn between Cleopatra and duty while Octavia (his wife) stews back in Rome. But not all three in 100 minutes.

Like Dracula, Cleopatra isn't a work of art so much as an extravaganza that panders to the largest possible audience. The sets are luxuriant: curtains of sun-burnt orange and palm green; a truncated obelisk topped off by a head of Isis; a rotunda'd green-marble Senate that suggests the Pantheon; a barge for Cleopatra whose sides open into falcon's wings that flank her throne, with a sun orb behind her to represent sky god Horus. And the costumes include eight changes and five different headpieces for Cleopatra alone. Rimsky-Korsakov, on the other hand, is not Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev -- maybe Borodin would have been a better choice. There are themes from Le coq d'or, and surely the march (sounding remarkably like Gustav Holst) that precedes Antony's arrival in Alexandria is the cortège from Mlada. But this is mostly second-rate stuff; even the exuberance of Jonathan McPhee's Boston Ballet Orchestra can't make it sound classy.

So we're left with spectacle -- "spectacle that dazzles the eye and touches the heart," according to the Dallas Morning News after Cleopatra's Houston premiere back in March. (The ballet is a co-production of Houston Ballet, Boston Ballet, and Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre.) Well, yes, spectacle always dazzles the eye, but it's art that touches the heart. Great story ballet, like great cinema and great drama, is built on characters and their relationships; here the characters are as flat as an Egyptian frieze, mostly because they spend hardly any time with each other. You wouldn't know that throne pretenders Ptolemy and Cleopatra are even siblings, let alone spouses. Perhaps inspired by the popular conception of Edward II and his adviser Gaveston (effete king, macho adviser), Ptolemy and Pothinus do better, but they're still stereotypes lockstepped into clumsy, clunky steps and lifts; and their "orgy" scene looks like a bad Esther Williams production number. (It could be that I'm not capable of appreciating a homosexual couple on stage, but I don't think so: the copulating heterosexual couples on the floor seem just as cheesy and unpalatable.)

Caesar comes on some 15 minutes before the end of act one; Cleopatra emerges from the rolled-up carpet and seduces him, Ptolemy and Pothinus are dismissed (Ptolemy carried out kicking and screaming), and there's a short, first-date pas de deux with some nice repeated gestures (the way Cleopatra keeps curling up against Caesar and sitting in his lap) before they head for bed and the curtain falls. Act two brings Cleopatra's triumphant arrival in Rome (while Calpurnia simmers), Calpurnia's nightmare, Caesar's death at the hands of the frenzied, short-toga'd conspirators (this scene leagues more homoerotic than that orgy), and brief recriminations between Calpurnia and Cleopatra. That's it for Caesar and Cleopatra -- where's the drama? Antony at least gets a second date with Cleopatra, where Stevenson's choreography begins to take on three-dimensionality. But nothing bespeaks this Cleopatra like its Brutus and Cassius: only those who know Christopher Budzynski from Reagan Messer will be able to tell which is which.

As with Dracula, the dancers do what they can to salvage this. Adriana Suárez brought passion to her regal, disdainful opening-night Cleopatra, but I didn't detect much nuance; she seemed all angles and sharp corners (granted, that's what Stevenson mostly calls for). I reacted better to Larissa Ponomarenko's sphinxlike queen, with her tantalizing hints of Audrey Hepburn (in the opening scene of self-discovery), Pocahontas (out in the desert), and Louise Brooks (when seducing Caesar) -- a birdlike Isis as against Suárez's more feline Bastet. (Here's the remaining schedule of Cleopatras: Ponomarenko May 11 and 13 (afternoon); Jennifer Gelfand May 12, 14, 18, and 20 (evening); Suárez May 13 (evening) and 20 (afternoon); and Kyra Strasberg -- who I'm sad to report will retire after this production -- May 16, 19, and 21.)

Cleopatra's men seemed more animated Friday: Paul Thrussell's aging Caesar grew young in Cleopatra's arms; Simon Ball's Mark Antony revealed a callow innocence. The two Pothinuses, Ball and Alex Lapshin, were nearly identical -- no surprise in this one-dimensional part; and I'd blame the choreographer rather than the dancer for Mikhail Ilyin's shticky, wimpy Ptolemy. Kyra Strasberg's voluminous opening-night Calpurnia, with her amplitude and extension and the plasticity of her phrasing, looked like a welcome visitor from another ballet, but neither she nor April Ball (more than decent on Friday) could avoid being swallowed up in the melodramatics of Calpurnia's nightmare. The mischievous life that was injected opening night by Pollyana Ribeiro and Jennifer Gelfand as the twin-like handmaidens Iras and Charmian (Marjorie Grundvig and Christina Elida Salerno were also good) left me wishing these characters had something, anything, to do with the plot.

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Boston Ballet is entering the 21st century on less than a roll. Over the course of 11 years Bruce Marks built this company into the fourth largest in America; but toward the end of his tenure, the attempt to extend every production to three weekends had to be curtailed, and in the 1998-'99 season Boston Ballet moved its smaller productions across the street to the Shubert Theatre. Now the company has parted company with artistic director Anna-Marie Holmes. What's in store?

General director and CEO Jeffrey Babcock has extolled the "creative collaboration" that led to Cleopatra -- but unless you have talent on the order of Stravinsky and Balanchine working together, creative collaborations tend to give generic results. And though glossy, "name" ballets like Dracula and Cleopatra may fill seats short-term, they won't build a company. Cleopatra cost $1 million; Boston Ballet paid for only a third, but that's still too much for what was, this past weekend, the fourth-most-gratifying event I attended, behind the Boston School for the Arts' On the Razzle, the Boston Academy of Music's Vanessa, and Russell Sherman's Liszt recital.

The company seems to be sliding downhill. Yet looking back at the past four years, I see, along with the clunkers like Carmen and The Pirate and Dracula and (perhaps) Cleopatra, sterling productions like A Midsummer Night's Dream and Onegin and Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet and Swan Lake, plus some intriguing smaller works by Daniel Pelzig (The Princess and the Pea, Cantabile, Passage, An American in Paris). On the bill for 2000-2001: Christopher Wheeldon's The Four Seasons and Daniel Pelzig's Barber Cello Concerto; the Petipa La Bayadère staged by Holmes; the Nutcracker; Jerome Robbins's Interplay, Rudi van Dantzig's Four Last Songs, and Balanchine's Theme and Variations; Michael Pink's The Hunchback of Notre Dame; and Sleeping Beauty. Not enough Balanchine (never enough Balanchine), but Hunchback is a story one can make a ballet out of, and all performances will be at the Wang, which is a move in the right direction. Now we just need some new productions where the sets and costumes don't upstage the dancers.