Love After Death: Boston Ballet redeems Giselle
By Jeffrey Gantz, The Phoenix
May 11, 2007
At 166 years old and sporting miles of white tulle, Giselle can look pretty moldy. With its frolicking-villager first act and ballet blanc second, it’s been a favorite of balletomanes ever since there were balletomanes. That might seem reason enough for everyone else to get the willies. But what’s kept Giselle going for 166 years is its story of a man who loves — or at least wants — two women, a story that’s lasted thousands of years and will last thousands more. Last night at the Wang Theatre, it was danced and acted with exemplary clarity by Boston Ballet, with a first-rate Giselle, a first-rate Myrtha, and a first-rate performance of the score by the Boston Ballet Orchestra. The only thing missing was audience fisticuffs over the first-night casting, or one of the on-stage Russian wolfhounds taking a nip at a corps member. As hip as Boston Ballet is, it’s still not the Pops.
The setting is a picturesque Rhineland village during the fall grape harvest, and Albrecht and Giselle are in love. Giselle, however, has another suitor, the gruff hunter Hilarion, who seems to think he has a claim on her. Is there a back story here? Was Giselle messing around with him before she met the more prepossessing Albrecht? And what’s Albrecht doing with a cloak and sword (which he stashes away before knocking on Giselle’s door)? Swords are for the nobility, not for village peasant lads. And why does Albrecht disappear when a hunting party including the Duke of Courland and his daughter Bathilde arrives? He misses the charming scene in which Giselle tells Bathilde she’s engaged and we learn that Bathilde is betrothed as well — though when the two girls look round, neither can find her fiancé.
No points for guessing that Giselle and Bathilde have the same sweetheart. The mystery is how Prince Albrecht — yes, our hero is nobility — expected to get away with it. Another ballet royal in the same predicament, Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake, solved his problem by refusing to marry any of the visiting princesses and standing by his swan sweetie. (And it would have worked if he hadn’t cheated on Odette with Odile.) But Albrecht can’t look either of his two women in the eye. Was Giselle meant to star in the ballet version of Seduced and Abandoned? Or does Albrecht really love her and just lose his nerve when Bathilde confronts him? Whatever, Hilarion finds the sword and presents it, Bathilde turns her back on Albrecht, and Giselle, who I forgot to mention has a dicky heart and shouldn’t really even be dancing, goes into cardiac arrest. Or does she actually stab herself with Albrecht’s sword, like Juliet sheathing Romeo’s “happy dagger”? (No points either for doping out the symbolism here.) Either way, she’s dead. Albrecht and Hilarion blame each other. The curtain falls.
Act one is day to act two’s night. Giselle has been laid to rest in the forest; why she wasn’t buried in the village cemetery is another mystery, unless it’s because the Church deemed her a suicide. The village church strikes midnight. Enter the grieving Hilarion, with lantern, and later Albrecht, with lilies. And of course the Wilis, the spirits of dead girls who were jilted and never saw their wedding day (and the likely source of the expression “get the willies”). They’re looking to avenge themselves by seducing and destroying young men — though in most productions of Giselle they’re not at all seductive. (Their queen Myrtha’s two subordinates are called “lieutenants,” which should tell you something.) Hilarion falls into their clutches and dances himself to death. Then it’s Albrecht’s turn. Will the newest Wili — Giselle — intercede for him? Will Myrtha’s heart soften when Giselle and Albrecht do their pas de deux? Will Albrecht’s fate hang on the caliber of his double tours and entrechat six? Or will Bathilde arrive at dawn to rescue him and live happily ever after?
Adolphe Adam’s score, which he wrote in less than a month, is often castigated as pretty and inoffensive and sub-Tchaikovsky, but Boston Ballet music director Jonathan McPhee has his orchestra performing it as if it were Tchaikovsky, finding drama and poetry and romance and not stinting on the cymbals. The Wang curtain rises on a front scrim that depicts a full-moon-lit vista framed by Grecian columns and sheer white curtains that fall like a bridal veil. This in turn rises to reveal Peter Farmer’s set, with Giselle’s humble wooden abode stage right and an equally modest wooden outbuilding stage left and the whole framed by birch trees (in Europe a symbol of fidelity) in a riot of autumn russet that gives the stage a claustrophobic feel. The costume colors — pumpkin and shades of brown and yellow — oversaturate the harvest theme; even some burgundy would be welcome.
The company’s opening-night Giselle, Larissa Ponomarenko, is thirtysomething going on 17, skipping about the stage, rocking like a blissful little girl in her ballottés, giving exquisite definition to the basic vocabulary (pointe shoes were new when Giselle debuted) of beats and arabesques. Her Giselle is at first not at all sure of Albrecht: she keeps trying to go back inside, and when he invites her to sit down on a bench, she spreads out her skirt on purpose to keep him from joining her. In her mad scene she’s a pantomime Ophelia, with the unnerving smile of an Eve who’s bitten into the apple. Roman Rykine as Albrecht isn’t the best match for her: she shimmies and he looks stolid by comparison, and often in their parallel moves he’s bigger and later. In the “daisy” section, where a distressed Giselle ends up with “He loves me not,” Rykine’s rescue — he tears a petal off the flower, making Giselle think she’s miscounted — is executed clearly enough to draw chuckles from the back of the house. And when Bathilde asks her royal fiancé what the hell he’s doing gamboling about the village in peasant clothes, Rykine’s immobile expression works in his favor as Albrecht tries to bluff his way out: he looks guilty in that vague, Robert Redford, “What do I do now?” way.
Reyneris Reyes’s grounded, earnest Hilarion may be self-serving in his exposure of Albrecht, and aghast that Giselle has (it seems) reneged on him, but he knows she doesn’t belong with Albrecht, and he shows a tender concern for her that goes beyond romantic feeling. Hilarion’s first act is mostly acting, as opposed to dancing, but Reyes has the body-language detail to suggest he could do Albrecht. In the Peasant Pas de Deux, which depicts the trusting relationship we expect to see from Albrecht and Giselle, Misa Kuranaga and Joel Prouty are also a shade mismatched (same story: he’s bigger and later), but she’s all delectable delicacy, as usual, and he lands numerous double tours at the full 720 degrees. Karine Seneca is at first patronizing and then sweet (if you’re close enough to see her smile) as Bathilde, who looks daggers at Albrecht when Giselle claims him as her fiancé. In the three productions Boston Ballet staged in the 1990s, Bathilde then cried on her father’s shoulder — she really loved Albrecht. Here Seneca just looks annoyed. The two Russian wolfhounds who come on with the hunting party are impeccable, though one is obviously a ballet fan — he can’t take his eyes off Ponomarenko — whereas the other just looks out into the wings and soaks up attention from the village girls.
The act-two curtain rises on a birch forest where Giselle’s grave is marked by a simple wooden cross that, in the dim light and flashes of lightning, looks like Albrecht’s sword. The Wilis rise out of the ground fog and dance their first number in their bridal veils (which usually blow off as they enter); this staging obscures their port de bras, but it does give a spooky aura to even the simplest relevé movements. Kathleen Breen Combes avoids the schoolmarmish, self-pitying wallflower affect that often mars Myrtha; her spirit queen is still sexy, still seductive, and still furious. The extension in her port de bras as she does her grands jetés is breathtaking. Giselle rises from her grave and is initiated into Wilihood, Ponomarenko whizzing backward in a circle like a dog chasing its tail. Albrecht appears, and there’s a magical moment when it’s not clear whether, as they dance together, he sees Giselle or merely feels her presence. In her simple steps — and no one makes simple steps look better than Ponomarenko — she tries to recapture the innocence of their first love; there’s another magical moment when he makes a back for her and she rests on him before returning to her grave.
Hilarion is chased on stage by the Wilis, who form the diagonal of doom as Myrtha gives him the thumbs down. He dances wildly, but instead of collapsing in a dramatic death drop, he’s just tossed off stage — you could imagine him running back to the village and finding a new sweetheart. At once the diagonal re-forms for Albrecht. Giselle intercedes and dances out her forgiveness, but though the show of reconciliation shows signs of melting the Wili corps, it doesn’t satisfy Myrtha, who wants more. Albrecht and Giselle oblige with, among other things, taxing entrechat sequences (well executed by both Ponomarenko and Rykine); Myrtha remains unmoved — you wonder whether anything less than an abject apology from her own intended will satisfy her. The deadlock is broken by the village church, whose chiming of four o’clock (dawn so early?) breaks the Wilis’ spell. In the original scenario, after Giselle bids Albrecht farewell, Bathilde arrives in the forest and takes him back — it’s a hint that perhaps he belonged with her all along. Here Giselle throws Albrecht a white rose and he clutches it to his breast — Rykine looking chastened and poetic — as the curtain falls.
Look for Jeffrey Gantz's review of all four Giselle casts on Monday.
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