There are two regrettable things about Casanova, Milwaukee Ballet’s ambitious season opener that ran Nov. 1-3 at the Marcus Performing Arts Center. The Midwest premiere of choreographer Kenneth Tindall’s opulent sketch on the real-life titular libertine got just four performances – a tragedy given the scope and scale of this extraordinary production. The enormity of it is perhaps why they opted for a recording of composer Kerry Muzzey’s powerfully moving (and very difficult) score instead of setting it on Milwaukee Ballet’s in-house orchestra. The effect is ever-so-slightly less immersive – quickly gotten over once this ballet grabs hold of you. And it did.
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From top to tail, Casanova is gorgeous. Stunning, shimmery scenic and costume elements (by Christopher Oram) and striking lighting (Alastair West) give literal references to 18th-century extravagance (seen in historically on-point wigs by Richard Mawbey, for example). But it’s wholly fresh and updated. Rococo gowns are shortened to mini-skirt length for the women, a practicality for contemporary ballet vocabulary and a provocation revealing garter straps securing thigh-high stockings that match their pointe shoes. A set of three gold-tinted Venetian columns are reversed and expanded in the second act to evoke a hall of mirrors akin to the Palace of Versailles. West plays ingeniously in Oram’s lush, luxurious sandbox, leaning on the set’s reflective assets and using thick haze to point sharp beams of light across the stage – evoking a time before electricity and maximizing the ballet’s drama.
Randy Crespo gave the best performance of his career as the complicated Giacomo Casanova (Josiah Cook danced Saturday and Sunday afternoon), carrying a difficult and nuanced emotional arc, not to mention an endless series of full-tilt solos and partner dances over, under and on top of set pieces, employing a rangy spectrum of classical and modern dance vocabulary.
The ballet opens in a Venetian monastery, where seminarian Casanova is tempted by vice and excommunicated. This inner conflict between piety and pleasure, fidelity and treachery is a running theme throughout the ballet – not just for Casanova, but also among his various companions and exploits, of which there are many. Indeed, Casanova routinely succumbs to his desires while among 18th-century Venetian socialites, a scene which pales to the debauchery of Paris encountered in the ballet’s second act.
In ballet, sex is an excuse for a pas de deux (in Casanova’s case, a few pas de trois, too). And Casanova had lots and lots of sex. In his ridiculously long memoir, he claims to have slept with more than 130 women and a few men, too. Tindall extracts the partners who were most pivotal to Casanova: a pair of sisters at the abbey (Nanaho Nakajima and Jacqueline Sugianto); a seductive nun named M.M. (Marize Fumero); cellist Manon Balletti (Marie Harrison-Collins); and two women, Bellino and Henriette, who, for very different reasons, disguise themselves as men (Lahna Vanderbush and Alana Griffith).
I was surprised to see the agency and independence of each of Casanova’s partners imbued in each encounter. There’s nervous naiveté in his first threesome at the abbey. The second, with M.M. and a priest who set the whole thing up, is raw and unencumbered. Casanova is playfully bashful with Manon, curiously infatuated by Bellino and tenderly caring toward Henriette. Like an 18th-century Don Draper, he seems to “only like the beginning of things,” but Casanova doesn’t merely use women and discard them. He is sentimental, reliving all of it at the ballet’s end as the pages of his memoir fall from the sky. In fact, the least sexy moment of this ballet is an on-stage orgy, with a rather detached Casanova seen at the bottom of a cuddle puddle – arms and legs flailing about as he looks for a distraction after losing Henriette.
Casanova is a homecoming of sorts for Tindall, who won the “audience favorite” prize in 2019 as one of three choreographers in Milwaukee Ballet’s Genesis competition. Casanova was his first full-length ballet, created in 2017 for Northern Ballet in Leeds, England, where he is currently associate director. I suspect it’s no coincidence that Milwaukee Ballet artistic director Michael Pink held that same job prior to his 1998 arrival in Milwaukee. Northern Ballet is the place where Pink cut his own choreographic teeth, creating Dracula, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and his versions of Swan Lake and Giselle.
Indeed, Tindall and Pink share a few things in common, namely a keen sense for storytelling and evocative dance making (here, staged by Christelle Horna). But they are miles apart aesthetically, which makes Milwaukee Ballet’s near-flawless execution of Casanova even more impressive. With so much of Pink’s work in the repertoire, it’s natural to question this company’s ability to take on something far outside his oeuvre. I stood corrected in 2021 when they masterfully executed canonical works by Perrot and Petipa. But pulling off is Casanova is a next-level challenge. Milwaukee Ballet not just managed to pull it off – they nailed it.
