THE SLEEPING BEAUTY
Music by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Choreography by Anna-Marie Holmes, after Marius Petipa. Set and costume design by David Walker. Lighting design by Mary Jo Dondlinger. With the Boston Ballet Orchestra conducted by Jonathan McPhee. At the Wang Theatre through May 20.

Your new high-profile artistic director quits before her first day on the job, leaving you with egg on your face. Your relatively new high-profile general director is short-listed for an academic deanship in Indiana. You’ve got a debt that’s been reported at well over $1 million. So you do what any ballet company does when it seems that life is all thorns and no roses: you call on Sleeping Beauty. Boston Ballet’s two previous productions of the 1890 Tchaikovsky/Petipa masterpiece, in 1993 and 1996, were landmarks, the first memorable for its partnership of Trinidad Sevillano and Patrick Armand. The 2001 edition is outgoing artistic director Anna-Marie Holmes’s swan song, and though it’s hardly the return to tradition it’s been billed as, it will allow the company to sleep a little more soundly this summer as it prepares for the difficult but not impossible season ahead.

The plot of Sleeping Beauty is a bedtime tale for troubled ballet troupes. Bad fairy Carabosse (indifferent audiences? uninformed critics?) has threatened to make the blood (cash) flow from Princess Aurora, but the good Lilac Fairy (a shrewd artistic director?) buys the company time, and eventually Prince Désiré (the kind of man who’ll empty his wallet for his sweetie) turns up and proposes (a seven-figure wedding gift). Tchaikovsky’s score attests to his own artistic growth since Swan Lake in 1878: right from the outset Carabosse’s nightmare menace (in a theme he used again a year later for the appearance of the Mice in Nutcracker) is followed by the Lilac Fairy’s show of maternal comfort; and in the course of the prologue and three acts he moves the tonality from E (heavenly innocence) to E-flat (manly heroism) to G (mature happiness) — note that the ballet does not end up where it began. Then there’s the wealth of solo opportunities: the five good fairies in the prologue, and in act three the Jewel Fairies and the storybook characters — not to mention the Garland Waltz for the corps. Perfect for a company that, like Boston Ballet, has depth.

Besides, the story isn’t as harmless as it looks. Carabosse is the Wallflower Fairy; we’re meant to ask whether she’s ugly because she’s mean or, maybe, mean only because she’s ugly. Catalabutte’s failure to invite her to Aurora’s christening is no mere oversight: the King and Queen are hoping to protect their daughter from evil, age, and all that is unpleasant in life. When Carabosse proclaims that Aurora will prick her finger, she’s decreeing that the life of this princess will be no fairy tale, that the world she’ll grow up into will include menstrual blood, thorns as well as roses, the distaff (symbol of women’s work on which the privileged Aurora will prick her finger) as well as the scepter. And this is no bad thing. In act one, Aurora is asked to choose among four cookie-cutter princes, none of whom has done anything to earn her love. Carabosse’s curse (sex) and the Lilac Fairy’s redemption (love) buys her time to sleep, to re-energize, to grow; and it ensures that if any man does wake her, he will have proved himself by penetrating (sexual imagery appropriate here) the thicket that the Lilac Fairy has erected. The action doesn’t end with that act-two kiss, either: as the good fairies danced out role models for Aurora in act one, so the fairy-tale characters of act three dance out marriage models (just like Nutcracker’s act-two parade of sweets).

Opening night I was taken aback to hear interim artistic coordinator Jonathan McPhee go from the Introduction’s Carabosse theme straight into the Marche, skipping over the Lilac Fairy countertheme — has he always done this and I never noticed? A good part of Tchaikovsky’s score grows out of these two themes, and without the Lilac Fairy how can we have a happy ending? Or maybe someone’s trying to warn us that, as the curtain rises, all is not perfect in the realm of Florestan XIV: beyond the vault of David Walker’s castle, with its heavy red hangings, the Bellini-like vista looks manicured, as if real life had, like Carabosse, been excluded; and the men’s black wigs seem heavy and artificial rather than elegant.

I was likewise perplexed by the bathroom-air-freshener names — Crystal Fountain, Enchanted Garden, Woodland Glade, Song Birds, Golden Vine — this production gives to the five fairies who come to bless Aurora. In Petipa’s original scenario, their names are descriptive of both the music and the choreography: Candide ample and artless; Fleur-de-Farine flowing in continuous motion, with hints of a mill grinding flour; Breadcrumb a scattering of crumbs (for the birds?) in its pizzicato strings; Canari a singing canary; Violente volatile and unpredictable, in contrast to the unflappable Lilac Fairy who rounds off the pas de six. Not that this really mattered in view of the excellence of the dozen or so ladies who danced these roles last weekend. Melissa Ward’s Candide sticks in my mind, and the Breadcrumbs of Tara Hench and Sasha Dmochowski, but there wasn’t a thorn in the bunch, a reassuring reminder of how this company can bloom.

What’s always given me pause in Boston Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty is Carabosse. If a production is to stand for anything more than the triumph of Good over Evil, then she wants the stature, and the complexity, of a Shakespearean outsider like hunchback Richard III or King Lear’s bastard Edmund. I have fond memories of Devon Carney’s over-the-top drag act from ’93 and ’96, but the role really calls for a sympathetic performer who can dance out her frustration and sadness and get the audience on her side (I wish I’d seen Annemarie Sarrazin do it back in the ’80s). Sergei Berejnoi is one-dimensional, a paper-tiger opponent for the Lilac Fairy — it’s the concept, not the performer, that’s wrong. All three Lilac Fairies I saw last weekend — April Ball, Jennifer Glaze, and Tatiana Jouravel — were excellent in the mimed exchange in which Carabosse decrees Aurora’s death and the Lilac Fairy alters the spell to sleep, but I wanted more complexity (five years ago Kyra Strasberg was so powerful, Patrick Armand’s Désiré looked ready to run away with her). Still, Ball was appealingly maternal, and I slowly warmed to Jouravel Saturday night. And I was touched by the way retired company soloist Dierdre Miles Burger, as the Queen (the ever dependable Arthur Leeth is her King), reaches out to her threatened baby as the prologue curtain falls.

Act one is Aurora’s coming-out party. All self-possession from the moment she enters, Larissa Ponomarenko is a tease, a flirt, a Scarlett O’Hara who runs off to seek the approval of her parents just as her four princes show up with plates of barbecue. The end of her Rose Adagio — that treacherous sequence of supported turns in attitude followed by unsupported moments (or eternities) on pointe — was defiantly unflamboyant. Pollyana Ribeiro gives us a younger Aurora who’s initially surprised by all the attention (check out her face and body language when the first rose is proffered) but is soon reveling in her suitors; she’s especially affectionate with the fairy attendants, as if she were inviting them to a pajama party after the show. Her Rose Adagio is more ostentatious than Ponomarenko’s but just as Gibraltar-like.

Filling in for Jennifer Gelfand on Saturday, Aleksandra Koltún was bright and effervescent, and those six o’clock penchées are fabulous, but she smiled at the audience more than at her suitors — I wonder whether she’s not too mature and sophisticated for this ingenue part. In the pit last weekend, Jonathan McPhee outdid himself with a slow, sensuous reading of the Rose Adagio that built and built to its orgasmic climax. Also noteworthy was the way the orchestra explodes from the King’s forgiveness of the knitters into the Garland Waltz, and the way the music takes on a loopy circus quality as soon as the disguised Carabosse presents Aurora with the fatal bouquet.

Then the aftermath: shock at the sensation of pain, bewilderment at the sight of blood, Aurora having matured sexually but not yet emotionally. The Watteau-like faded-green foliage of act one gives way, 100 years later, to the still more tangled Caspar David Friedrich trees of act two, where Prince Désiré first appears. Like Ponomarenko, Simon Ball flowers on contact with the audience: you can sense a generosity of spirit in his large, complete movements, and when the hunting party leaves him in solitude, he’s the epitome of MPS (moody-prince syndrome). But though his classical technique complements hers, they don’t look right together: he’s so American, she’s so European. Maybe I was suffering from opening-night MCS (moody-critic syndrome), but they just didn’t seem to connect through acts two and three.

José Martín is less forthcoming, almost Seinfeld-like in his self-questioning (“How did I get to be a prince anyway?”), but he has big jumps and soft landings, and he all but melts into Ribeiro; their act three is a continuing interplay of eyes. Subbing for Paul Thrussell on Saturday, Alex Lapshin was gentle and authoritative — think of a young David Niven or Leslie Howard — and he caught Koltún’s eye; she looked much more focused in their act-two pas des refusés (neither dancer has been invited back next year), and in the act-three polonaise and mazurka they evoked the St. Petersburg of tsarist Russia’s dreams. Can a company that keeps sending its principals out on blind dates really afford to ditch a couple with chemistry?

The end of act two raises another staging quibble: Aurora and Désiré are so far upstage, their kiss and first embrace hardly register. As for act three, the fairy-tale couples — Puss in Boots and the White Cat, the Blue Bird and Princess Florine, Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf — seem meant as models for Aurora and Désiré, but only the Blue Bird and Florine get a pas de deux as opposed to a pas de caractère. (In the original, Tchaikovsky inserted a number for Cinderella and Prince Fortuné, but that seems to have disappeared.) The Jewel Fairy pas de quatre — Gold, Silver, Sapphire, Diamond — suggests Aurora has awakened into world that’s more materialistic than the one she fell asleep in: Tchaikovsky scores for piano here and later in Aurora’s adagio where in act one we heard the more ethereal harp. Boston Ballet’s staging replaces the pas de quatre with “Prince Florimund and his two sisters” (what kind of relationship model is that?); I was also disconcerted to see Florimund dancing the Sapphire Fairy’s 5/4 variation (and to hear the brass bury the pizzicato strings). Even worse, there’s no piano — we get the harp again, a switch that sugarcoats Tchaikovsky’s act three doubts. Just compare the triumphant ending of his Rose Adagio with its ambivalent counterpart here.

And yet . . . how many American companies have the resources or the smarts to do Sleeping Beauty this well? So at the end of the evening this critic thinks back to, among other felicities, the ferociously complex Garland Waltz (kudos to the kids), and he counts his blessings rather than his complaints. The bottom line here is Boston Ballet’s dancers, who have not just technique but interesting personalities. That’s the kind of asset that can wipe out even a $1 million deficit.

Go to www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/music/otr/documents/01538992.htm for Jeffrey’s review of the Boston Ballet Orchestra’s new Sleeping Beauty CD.

Issue Date: May 10-17, 2001