Creative Risk

If the ballet world now seems inundated with Dracula productions, Frankenstein adaptations are a rarer sight. Perhaps that is because Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is arguably a more psychological study—exploring the consequences of Dr. Frankenstein’s archetypal hubris, creating life out of dead matter. The Creature was not actually “born” a monster but shunned by all of society for his look; he eventually seemingly fulfills his prophecy as a monster. Yet, the novel beckons the question of whether the real monster just may be Dr. Frankenstein.

Performance

San Francisco Ballet: “Frankenstein” by Liam Scarlett

Place

Segerstrom Hall, Costa Mesa, California, October 5, 2025

Words

Robert Steven Mack

Joshua Jack Price and Max Cauthorn in “Frankenstein” by Liam Scarlett. Photograph courtesy of Segerstrom Center for the Arts

San Francisco Ballet’s closing performance of the late Liam Scarlett’s “Frankenstein” on October 5 at Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa, California captured the essence of this. While the ballet nominally centers on the studious and inhibited Victor Frankenstein, the Creature eventually takes the spotlight. In his skin-tight nude suit, he looks nothing like the Boris Karloff-inspired countenance that the creature has become synonymous with in popular culture.

In Scarlett’s libretto, Frankenstein, whom the program notes refer to simply as Victor, danced on the Sunday October 5th performance by Max Cauthorn, is an aspiring scientist from a good Geneva family. In his university studies, Victor encounters a groundbreaking theory on reanimating dead matter. Alone in a workshop, adorned with gothic eye candy by the designer John MacFarland, Victor cobbles together various post-mortem scraps. Aided by a brilliant pyrotechnic display, Victor lifts the body to the heavens and through electrical means reanimates the dead. The result however is hideously deformed, a Promethean experiment gone wrong.

The second act onward is defined by the physical machinations of the Creature, danced by Joshua Jack Price. Victor recedes into brooding passivity, a nagging Dostoevskian guilt over the hideous aberration of the man that he created. In Shelley’s original novel, the Creature’s inner dialogues clearly convey a gentle earnestness that is difficult for dance to capture. Shelley’s Creature is a tabula rasa absorbing the likes of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, hungry to understand the workings of man. His thirst for knowledge and connection notwithstanding, his Prometheus, Victor, rejects his own creation.

San Francisco Ballet in “Frankenstein” by Liam Scarlett. Photograph courtesy of Segerstrom Center for the Arts

The ballet doesn’t convey all of these layers, but it captures Victor's moral reckoning and the sense that had he embraced his creation as his “Adam,” the course of events might have been very different. The creature is ridden with otherness, separated from society thanks to his Victor Hugo-esque deformity; an early vignette seemingly shows schoolmates beating him up. Now an outsider, he turns against the world.

In a disturbing scene, the Creature lures away and then kills Victor’s young brother William and frames the housekeeper's daughter, Justine, danced by Julia Rowe. This is the moment where all innocence is lost, both for the Frankensteins and for the Creature.

Liam Scarlett’s choreography seems more untethered for the Creature, compared to the classical formalism of other characters. One wonders if he identified more with Frankenstein or the monster or if he saw them as alter egos. Four years prior to his early death, he choreographed this production for the Royal Ballet in 2016; a year later the San Francisco Ballet adopted it into its repertoire. It has since been revived but seldom, perhaps owing to the uncomfortable circumstances of Scarlett’s demise. The thirty-five year old choreographic prodigy faced allegations of sexual misconduct against his students in 2019 which led the Royal Ballet to cut ties with him in March 2020, even after an independent investigation had found no corroborating evidence of the claims against him. One month later, his parents found him dead in Suffolk. He left notes to his family which pointed to suicide, which a coroner’s report later confirmed. Only days before his death on April 16, the Royal Danish Ballet had announced that it had canceled its spring 2022 mounting of his “Frankenstein.”

San Francisco Ballet in “Frankenstein” by Liam Scarlett. Photograph courtesy of Segerstrom Center for the Arts

Of course, his gothic ballet was choreographed long before his fall from grace. One can only ponder the tragic irony that it was his ballet about an outsider that would be (in both the literal and cultural manner) “canceled” and that Scarlett would, whatever the veracity of the allegations, find himself an outcast, branded in effect as a “monster.”

Perhaps simply enough time has elapsed for the affair to have conveniently faded, but Tamara Rojo’s San Francisco can be lauded for resurrecting this masterful dance translation. Only a few years ago, its return would be harder to imagine.

As for the monster in Scarlett’s ballet, his chances at redemption are more complicated. He wants a mate or else threatens to take the life of Victor’s wife-to-be, Elizabeth Laventa, played by the angelic Sasha de Sola. Victor refuses and the Creature shows up at his wedding, killing first his friend Henry Clerval and then Elizabeth. In a departure from the book, Victor, realizing that thanks to his scientific obsessions he has lost everyone he loved, takes his own life, leaving the creature alone in the world. Unlike Scarlett, the creature lives on.

It’s difficult to imagine another company pulling off a story ballet better than this. San Francisco Ballet, known for its crystalline technique, which de Sola especially exemplifies, has mounted a production that is almost wonderfully old fashioned. With striking set visuals and choreography that straddles classical and contemporary, the production also features a moving score by Lowell Liebermann, who channeled the story's romanticist roots.

Perhaps the raucous applause from the audience came from a relief that a ballet adaptation of a classic novel actually made the story more interesting. The sets, the character studies and the emotion place the audience within the gothic strangeness of nineteenth-century Geneva, at a moment of reckoning for a scientific revolution. Like any classic story, it did not need updating or deconstruction, because the themes speak for themselves and speak to us just as clearly. Scarlett may now be gone, but he leaves behind the ballet he created, and like the Creature standing at the edge of the sunset at the end of the ballet, perhaps it too can have another life.

Robert Steven Mack

Robert Steven Mack is a company artist with City Ballet of San Diego and an award-winning filmmaker. His writing has appeared in The New Criterion, Law and Liberty, American Purpose, and Arts Fuse. Robert received his Master of Public Affairs from Indiana University, Bloomington, from which he also holds a BA in History and a BS in Ballet Performance from the Jacobs School of Music.

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