The Sleeping Beauty can be the grandest of classical ballets, with a sweeping formal beauty that can make even a simplistic fairy tale of goodness and true love conquering evil meaningful to grown-ups. Not so with American Ballet Theater's production of Marius Petipa's 1890 classic, which opened a five-performance run on Thursday night at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in a Beauty as bright as a Disney cartoon and with about as much depth.
Restaged by ABT artistic director Kevin McKenzie, with Gelsey Kirkland, one of ABT's stars of the 1970s, and her husband, theater director and choreographer Michael Chernov, this version of Beauty was lambasted by critics after it opened in June of last year for alterations to the story and staging, and cuts to some of the ballet's most beloved set pieces. Most of the drastic changes were gone Thursday, but what was left often felt truncated choreographically and emotionally.
The trio's idea seems to have been to bring out the ballet's storybook qualities, to make it brighter and friendlier. Tony Walton's sets have the graphically exaggerated quality of a cartoon, while Willa Kim's technicolored, glittering costumes verge on garish.
While in a way it was refreshing not to see yet another fake stone castle, some of the staging is cheesy. In the first act, the evil fairy Carabosse (a splendidly extravagant Martine Van Hamel, another ABT great from the 70s) enters and exits with an explosion of fireworks, attended by bulbous-headed red and green creatures who look like escapees from a low-tech science-fiction flick.
And any gains in visual punch were canceled out by lost choreographic power. Big formal set pieces like the garland dance in the first act are reduced, and the charming storybook character dances in the wedding finale -- Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, the Cat and Puss-in-Boots -- were almost gone.
That's a pity, because ABT's impressive roster of talent could certainly handle it. The four men accompanying Prince Désiré, the surreally square-jawed Gennadi Saveliev, leapt just as high and light and cleanly as he did. Victor Barbee and Melissa Thomas brought warm humanity and dramatic detail to what could be the cardboard cutout roles of King Florestan and his queen. Sascha Radetsky made up for a couple of stumbles by seeming to actually hover in the Bluebird variation, with a delicious, crystalline Hee Seo as his Princess Florine. Saveliev barely moved his face, but he is a refined and powerful dancer. Veronika Part was authoritative but stiff as the Lilac Fairy.
But the heart of any ballet is its ballerina, and Paloma Herrera, as Princess Aurora, has none in her dancing. It's the way that Petipa shows Aurora's glowing innocence in the first act, and her sense of radiant fulfillment at the end, that gives Sleeping Beauty depth. Herrera makes us feel none of that. She is technically accomplished, with lovely legs and line. But she seems to hear only the count and none of the feeling in some of Tchaikovsky's most achingly beautiful music. Her acting is wooden. There's no sense of dimension in her body or arms and she bangs out her phrases, instead of moving through them. It was a two-dimensional portrait, as flashy and flat as this Sleeping Beauty.
