Run through the heavy hitters of the ballet repertoire, and you won’t find too many moments that make you chuckle. Tragedy rules the toe shoes, from Swan Lake to Giselle. And even if there’s a happy ending, there aren’t a lot of giggles or belly laughs along the way.
But there are plenty of guffaws in Michael Pink’s Cinderella, which opened Thursday night at the Marcus Center. In fact, there’s pretty much everything in the Milwaukee Ballet’s production, from exquisite dancing to hilarious slapstick to deft storytelling.
Sergei Prokofiev finished his much loved score to Cinderella in 1944, decades after the golden age of Russian ballet, which gave us the template for much of the classical repertoire (Petipa and Fokine staged the story to different music). These days, the most popular Cinderella comes from one of Pink’s countrymen, Sir Frederick Ashton. And Rudolf Nureyev, a friend and mentor of Pink, set his version of the ballet in 1930s Hollywood, with the title character as an overlooked starlet.
But this Cinderella is uniquely Pink’s own. It is streamlined, driven by story and character, and full of romance and charm. It’s also driven, I think, by the resources at Pink’s disposal–namely the superb dancers of the Milwaukee Ballet company.
This Cinderella—created in 2009 and revived here for the first time—is full of great roles for dancers, from the comic hijinks of the two stepsisters (Patrick Howell and Timothy O’Donnell in drag—or en travesti as they say in ballet circles), to the acrobatic “pumpkin dance” of Jack (Marc Petrocci), a new addition to the traditional story.
The stepsisters, for example, go far beyond the usual gender-bending slapstick comedy. Here, they dance—hilariously—lampooning ballet conventions with gleeful travesties of traditional steps. And they get help from other talented comedians–among the “outfitters” arriving to prepare them for the ball, Ryan Martin and Garrett Glassman have great fun as the dance instructor and his enthusiastic violinist.
It isn’t all fun and games, though. Luz San Miguel finds poignant charm in her dreamy, introspective performance as Cinderella. She’s drawn out of her shell by The Prince, of course (Alexandre Ferreira), but Pink doesn’t turn their blossoming romance into a suite of ballet showpieces, as is typical in classical ballet. During the ball—a shimmery sea of gold and ivory (thanks to Peter Cazalet’s costuming)—they wind a path through the formal symmetries of the court dances, lost in their new infatuation. When the time does come to dance their new found love, Pink avoids balletic pyrotechnics, choosing instead to reflect the simply joys of finding The One, even as his choreography negotiates the tricky three-then-four-then-three again meters of Prokofiev’s music.
And what music. The modern edge of Prokofiev’s score perfectly balances the familiar sentiments of the story. Conductor Pasquale Laurino helped the Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra find all its nuances, from blaring brass to the singing waltz melodies. It’s hard to imagine a more aptly perfect way for the Milwaukee Ballet to close another stellar season.
