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Flash Review 1, 6-5: ABT Scales
"Onegin"
...But Cranko Still Doesn't Get Pushkin
By Alicia Mosier
Copyright 2001 Alicia Mosier
It's beginning to get a bit perplexing,
the way American Ballet Theatre manages to inspire its dancers to such extraordinary
heights after wedging them into productions with eight-foot ceilings. That was
the case with David Parsons's "The Pied Piper," which premiered two weeks ago,
and it is even more staggeringly the case in John Cranko's "Onegin," the 1965
Stuttgart Ballet production (revised in 1967) which ABT -- the first American
company to acquire the work -- performed for the first time on Friday at the Metropolitan
Opera House.
"Onegin" is a major acquisition for
ABT, whose search for new evening-length works has led it down such dubious paths
as, well, "The Taming of the Shrew" (another Cranko blockbuster, seen last year).
Sumptuous and crowd-pleasing as it is, showing ABT in its full chandelier-and-drapery
mode, "Onegin" is a decidedly mixed bag: both emotionally sweeping and ridiculous,
both dramatic and dull, made up of equal parts bombast and weak tea, and bearing
only a tenuous resemblance to (and sometimes betraying outright) the poem by Pushkin
and the opera by Tchaikovsky on which it is based. All of that said, and returning
to my original perplexity, Julie Kent, Robert Hill, Maria Riccetto, and Vladimir
Malakhov gave superb performances Friday as Tatiana, Onegin, Olga, and Lensky
-- performances which, especially in the case of Riccetto and Malakhov, contained
some of the finest examples of theatrical dancing I have ever seen.
In his translator's note to the 1977
Penguin edition of Pushkin's poem, Charles Johnston wrote that "there is a whole
magic [to the poem] which goes by default: the touching lyrical beauty, the cynical
wit ...; the psychological insight, the devious narrative skill, the thrilling,
compulsive grip of the novel; the tremendous gusto and swing and panache of the
whole performance." Those elements, which make a verse translation difficult,
make a translation into another art form even more challenging. The poem tells
the story of a perfectly educated and perfectly bored aristocrat, Eugene Onegin,
who with his friend Lensky makes his way to the country home of a bourgeois family.
Lensky, his head filled with Romantic poetry, is in love with one of this family's
daughters, Olga. The other daughter, Tatiana, is the quintessential Russian heroine:
artless, intelligent, given to daydreaming at the window and reading romance novels
and Rousseau. She falls head over heels for Onegin, and stays up all night writing
him an impassioned love letter which, the next day, he tears up before her eyes,
with the explanation that he's outgrown that sort of thing and that by accepting
her love he would only be taking advantage of her naivete. Tatiana is shattered.
A little while later, Lensky invites
Onegin back to the country house for Tatiana's birthday party. Tatiana has a horrible
dream filled with portents about both men. When they arrive, Onegin -- bored again
-- amuses himself by flirting with Olga, which provokes Lensky into challenging
him to a duel. They fight, and Lensky is killed. For the next several years, the
listless Onegin drifts from one place to another, until one night he turns up
at the house of Prince Gremin, who in the interim has married Tatiana. Onegin
is astonished at her elegance: she's now a far cry from the little girl whom he
rejected. Overcome by the anguish of his mistake, he writes her a letter as impassioned
as the one she wrote to him so long ago. Tatiana refuses to see him, but when
he bursts into her room she is overwhelmed by memories of her earlier love. But
now it is she who refuses his letter: suggesting that he's only attracted to the
show of her newly fancy life at the palace, she tells him that he still hasn't
understood her, and that she will not now accept him. Here's how Johnston translates
Tatiana's final words to Onegin:
"Bliss was so near, so altogether
attainable! ... But now my lot is firmly cast. I don't know whether I acted thoughtlessly
or not: you see, with tears and incantation mother implored me; my sad station
made all fates look the same ... and so I married. I beseech you, go; I know your
heart: it has a feeling for honour, a straightforward pride. I love you (what's
the use to hide behind deceit or double-dealing?) but I've become another's wife
-- and I'll be true to him, for life."
In the heartbreaking irony and pathos
of this poem, Cranko (who, like Pushkin, died relatively young) seems to have
seen only the crudest outlines of a drama. At least that's what his ballet, set
to a pastiche of Tchaikovsky tunes, suggests. It never reaches for those elements
Johnston describes, never moves beyond the basics of the libretto. Even so, failures
of storytelling abound, most egregiously in the scene where Onegin tears up Tatiana's
letter, which Cranko sets in the middle of her birthday party, thus forcing Tatiana
to keep on dancing with her guests after her whole world has been destroyed. (On
the other hand, *something* has to happen at that party besides Lensky getting
peeved....) Scenes like this happen again and again in the ballet. In the first
act, Onegin introduces himself in a solo in which he repeatedly sweeps his hand
against his forehead (read: listlessness); he dances distractedly with Tatiana,
who simpers around him on her pointes; and just when an interesting relationship
begins to take shape, Eric Otto leaps in and Sean Stewart does an arial and all
the family friends join hands and scamper. At Prince Gremin's palace, Onegin demonstrates
his anguish by brooding amidst a whirl of gorgeous women. He stands blackly in
the middle of the room for ten full seconds, then all of a sudden he goes away
and the party guests come bubbling on. Any semblance of an emotional moment is
intruded upon by a lively little number. Our experience of the narrative consists
of bits of hyper-concentrated intensity surrounded by froth.
There are three major group scenes
in "Onegin" -- the garden party in Act I, the birthday party in Act II, and the
ball at Prince Gremin's palace in Act III. All are messy masses. Cranko's attempts
at Russian-style folk steps for the friends in Act I are half-hearted at best;
his attempts at an elegant waltz in Act III are even worse. The nobility of some
of his dance phrases is nullified by some fuzzy thing that's going on in front
of them. The lack of architecture in these scenes is matched by the lack of dynamic
momentum in solos (in Lensky's solo before the duel, all you see are preparations)
and the lack of sinew in the many long pas de deux. Cranko "reads" us Tatiana's
letter to Onegin by showing them in an imaginary dance together in her bedroom.
Onegin hops in through the mirror and spends a good five minutes literally sweeping
her off her feet. I wouldn't want to be hauled around like that even in my sleep.
These duets look hemmed in even when they're moving at top speed (though I did
like the lovely "sitting" lift Kent and Hill do in their concluding pas de deux
-- *not* the ridiculous fanny lift of Act I -- in which Kent looks like she's
resting on a chaise lounge in the air). They're Kenneth MacMillan-esque without
MacMillan's gift for showing -- through something other than grimacing or grinning,
as in Cranko -- the subtle varieties of passion that occur in a single passionate
encounter. In short, they're Soviet-style harangues.
Two of the pas de deux almost escape
this shipwreck. Amidst the gavottes and gowns in the Act II party (the costumes
and sets, in burnished red and gold and blue, are by Jurgen Rose), Olga and Lensky
dance out a terrific drama that shows how their relationship has deepened since
they first danced together in a luscious duet in Act I. Half the time, however,
they're partially obscured by the relentless frolicking of the other guests. In
Act III, Prince Gremin lifts and leans the red-gowned Tatiana through a stunning
pas de deux infused with the gentleness and maturity of married love. (It also
includes, courtesy of Carlos Molina as the Prince, the softest shoulder-sit in
memory -- and the loveliest descent.) One might explain the difference by noting
that in neither of these pas de deux does Onegin appear. Maybe Cranko is saying
that Onegin can't have a fulfilling relationship? Perhaps, but as Pushkin tells
it, Tatiana really loves him and thinks there's much in him to admire ("a feeling
for honour, a straightforward pride"). There's nothing to see in this Onegin,
and so Tatiana comes across as more stupidly infatuated than she might already
seem.
Only a failure of choreographic imagination
could make Tatiana and Onegin less interesting than Olga and Lensky, and this
is what Cranko has done. His secondary characters are tremendous. Malakhov gives
Lensky a terrifically sunny temperament, an ironical smile, and long, lush balances
in arabesque. This is a true Pushkinian poet. (Malakhov probably grew up reading
Pushkin.) Riccetto, an outstanding corps member who with this performance makes
herself a star, has a modest, faultless technique and the full complement of gifts
as an actress. These two in these roles are the best thing in the ballet; it's
well worth going just to see them.
Compared to the exploratory dances
Cranko creates for these two roles, his choreography for Tatiana and Onegin tells
us little more about who they are than we already know. But Julie Kent and Robert
Hill pour themselves into their characters with abandon. Hill, looking every bit
the distinguished cad, brings strong shading to a part whose emotional colors
are pretty much limited to inky black (like his costume -- get it?). Kent is always
a wonder in roles that offer her a chance to complexify a character. Here, despite
the limited range the ballet keeps her to, she takes Tatiana from a completely
believable girl to a completely believable wife, as her dresses go from pale pink
to red to elegant brown. The really dramatic scenes don't give her much to work
with (mostly grinning or grimacing; see above); the pure dance solos, while demanding,
come out of nowhere and go right back again. But from the moment she meets Onegin
-- actually, from the moment we see her reading in a corner while her family is
gossiping around a table -- Kent reveals with every expression a purity and a
conflict that point toward the Tatiana of Pushkin's poem, whom Cranko's prolix
ballet does little to conjure up.
"Onegin" continues at ABT through
June 7.
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