Beauty goes Big

Well, it’s big,” Seattle ballet fans were saying as they headed into McCaw Hall’s sleek sanctuary of velvet settees and shiny metal staircases. Those who had already seen Pacific Northwest Ballet’s new production of “The Sleeping Beauty” were raising eyebrows at fresh viewers, whose hopes stretched as high as the nearby Space Needle. “It’s big, and it’s a lot,” people warned, but no one seemed to be complaining; as our phones exploded with news of the US government’s coup-from-within, progressive locals seemed relieved to spend two and a half hours inside a fantasy world ruled by beneficent monarchs whose worst transgression is omitting a vengeful fairy from the guest list.

Performance

Pacific Northwest Ballet: “Sleeping Beauty”

Place

McCaw Hall, Seattle, WA, January 31 and February 1, 2025

Words

Rachel Howard

Angelica Generosa and Jonathan Batista, with company dancers in Peter Boal’s new staging of “The Sleeping Beauty.”Photograph by Angela Sterling

So, yes: a new “Sleeping Beauty” production is always, by its innermost essence, a lot—a company’s bid for establishment grandeur and for classical dancing maturity. PNB already had a “Beauty” production in its rep, but this one is bigger, and pricey: $4.35 million, the largest production in the company’s 53-year history. In keeping with the Russian Imperial Theater ethos that birthed this ballet, too much of a muchness is the point: the climactic tableau of the opening Christening scene features six fairies, their pages, eight lilac fairy attendants, six “Fairies with Fans,” gift bearers, courtiers, pages, and a nurse and a governess (who, dressed in stark red with severe white hats, seem disturbingly borrowed from “The Handmaid’s Tale”)—all arrayed around a peculiarly wooden and evidently weightless baby Princess Aurora, held high. So many bodies on stage from a company with 44 dancers and four apprentices: ambition indeed.

To array all this splendor, marquee names were tapped—Paul Tazewell, whose costumes for “Wicked” recently snagged an Oscar nomination; Preston Singletary, a glass artist who works with influences from his indigenous Tlingit culture; and the ubiquitous puppeteer Basil Twist. But interestingly, a much more obscure name known mostly to PNB’s local audience stands at the center of this “Beauty”: Doug Fullington, a musicologist and dance historian who for 30 years has worked with PNB on everything from classroom piano accompaniment to audience education. It’s Fullington’s research into the Stepanov notation of “Beauty,” first written down about 15 years after the ballet’s 1890 premiere, that gives this version its bones, though artistic director Peter Boal had the final say on all staging decisions. But more on that, and the results, in a minute. First, a practical reality: As Fullington himself noted in a pre-curtain talk, a production this big has to stand up there with “Nutcracker” and “Swan Lake” as a dependable box office draw. And when it comes to that goal, PNB seems to have a hit.

Pacific Northwest Ballet company dancers with PNB School students in Peter Boal’s new staging of “The Sleeping Beauty.” Photograph by Angela Sterling

The thing about “Sleeping Beauty,” of course, is that however much we enjoy reading into the story symbolically, it’s not exactly plot-driven. Unlike “Giselle” and “Swan Lake,” which really can offer narrative excitement, “Beauty” is less like watching a movie and more like going to Disneyland, hoping to be reasonably and regularly amused as you wait out the lines between e-ticket rides. That’s what PNB mostly pulls off here, and the prime attractions aren’t just pirouettes and attitude balances. Perhaps the smartest thing Peter Boal did was include, near the end, an adorable ogre puppet for “Hop ‘o my Thumb,” one of the wedding divertissements that almost every production leaves out. I don’t think anyone in that 3,000-seat auditorium remembered the source fairy tale or had any clue why a row of adorable children were stealing the ogre’s boots, but with that two-person monster waggling and winking, it didn’t matter. Kids and parents will want to see that ogre again over the years—repeat box office purpose served by the simplest kind of theater magic.

The approach to the setting, meanwhile, is both local-audience savvy and substantive. We’re in the Pacific Northwest, in some mythical “once upon a time,” with the costumes somehow mashing up “The Wizard of Oz” and native Tlingit aesthetics—striking black formlines layered upon the court dresses, and villager outfits that draw from Tlingit regalia. The set has a clean, grand dignity, with a giant archway featuring an eagle’s head defining the palace. (There’s an indigenous-inspired story overlay about raven and eagle clans that feels complicated in combination with the fairy tale, too, but this viewer couldn’t quite track it.) It’s always a good idea to tap into the audience’s home pride, and this production accomplishes that with projections from Wendall K. Harrington that take us soaring over lupine and poppy-covered fields, then searching through fern-laden forests. The panorama when the Lilac Fairy and Prince Désiré board a canoe to deliver him to the sleeping princess is especially painterly and lovely, journeying to a grey-shaded, moody twilight before the dawn. Then the kiss that awakens Aurora comes with an animated explosion of monarch butterflies, in the way your phone blows up with balloons and fireworks if you text someone congratulations. The prolonged effect is smart, because the kiddos probably need that cartoon hit to rope their attention back in—this “Beauty” condenses a prologue and three acts into two long acts, with the vision scene, the panorama, and the kiss all moving us directly into the long wedding celebration.

Leta Biasucci as the Princess Aurora, with company dancers and PNB School students in Peter Boal’s new staging of “The Sleeping Beauty.” Photograph by Angela Sterling

About that kiss—I’ve heard objections in recent years that the “Beauty” storyline violates Aurora’s right to sexual consent, but here she actually does participate in building a relationship with the prince before they meet. That’s because Boal and Fullington’s production has a vision scene in which Aurora is less of a sleepwalking ghost and instead—by some fantasy logic that worked for me—an active participant in the dream, talking with the prince in mime, and working to pull him towards her. This was a major dramaturgical strength of the staging—and later, in the wedding pas de deux, Aurora even gets a moment of agency when she declares by mime, “Yes! I will marry you.”

The major dramaturgical weakness of the staging, meanwhile, was the hunt scene that opens Act Two. The choreographic action and the costumes are both a problem. Prince Désiré may be a kind of a watered-down Siegfried from “Swan Lake,” but he still needs to be a person we can connect with, root for. In Fullington and Boal’s staging, five upper-crusty women expect the prince’s attentions, and Tazewell dresses them nearly identically in head-to-toe teal with their hair pulled under helmet-sized hats—they don’t seem like real people (no one on the hunt does), and Boal and Fullington count on the traditional mime to get the Prince’s emotional state across. (He pulls his hand down in front of his face to indicate “I’m melancholy.”) We watch the usual business with the prince’s squire being made to play blind man’s buff, but it feels like it’s happening just because it’s in the original production’s notation, not because anyone involved with this staging has thought about the social and emotional dynamics of the scene. Lots of missed opportunity for characterization and creating a portrait of the superficial life that Prince Désiré longs to transcend.

But where this production does transcend—and frequently—is in the steps as informed by that historical Stepanov notation. This is, I sense, the deeper ambition of this production, the raison d’être all the costumes and sets serve. To be clear, PNB’s production is not a historical exercise in the vein of Alexei Ratmansky’s 2015 staging for American Ballet Theatre. All the technique and norms about leg heights here are circa 2025, not 1890. At his pre-curtain talk, Fullington put his motivations for working with the historical notation this way: “I think of it as going into an old home—you walk into the kitchen and find 10 layers of wallpaper.” The idea is to strip the ballet down to see what was actually first there in order to make your own aesthetic decisions based on what you find.

Elle Macy (center) as the Lilac Fairy, with company dancers in Peter Boal’s new staging of “The Sleeping Beauty.” Photograph by Angela Sterling

So then, this “Beauty” is more like a well-flipped house, less like an architectural restoration. Which means we’ll find a modern light fixture next to that repainted original wainscotting—or in this case, those decidedly post-1890s fish dives in the wedding pas de deux, even though when the Prince and Aurora rush towards each other on that run of piano notes, they meet in a simple embrace rather than the ironing-board arabesque penchée that became standard in the mid-twentieth century. This “Beauty” is all about choreographic taste, then—and within that, a whole value system. As George Balanchine said, “La danse, madame, c’est une question morale.” What a stager or choreographer values in the steps—gymnastic elasticity or compelling plastique? Preening poses or wholeness of phrasing?—these define a view of how human bodies offer themselves most generously as a model of highest humanity. I happen to think the taste shown here is heartwarming and exquisite.

Much depends, evidently, on the tempi the orchestra takes with Tchaikovsky’s score, which Fullington contends was more consistently brisk when Marius Petipa created the choreography: the adagios calm, yes, but still moving things along. Stepanov notation works by pairing the musical staffs of the score with indications of the steps that fit in each measure and phrase, and according to those notes, at the end of the nineteenth century ballerinas fit in faster, crisper, petite allegro steps. The values here, then, are speed, clarity, really travelling across the stage, and rhythm. (Hmm, sound like Balanchine, anyone?)

When the grown-up Aurora first enters, this is thrilling, especially as danced at the Saturday matinee cast by the compact, dynamic Leta Biasucci. A relatively simple trip down the diagonal in a pas de chat phrase is followed by another pass with a tricker enchaînement that requires both precision and total immersion in the music. Bright and gracious in character, Biasucci was masterful at this, and she was the only ballerina among three I saw in the role who made me feel I couldn’t believe the virtuosity I was seeing. And the artistry, too—Biasucci’s arms above her bourrées in the vision scene were like watching smoke rise and swirl, real but evanescent. (Elle Macy, who played the Lilac Fairy in two casts that I saw, rivalled Biasucci for expressive beauty of ports de bras.)

The principal Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan had a turn in the third cast that Saturday night, and though less jaw-dropping, she was impressive, working with longer limbs but an equally secure center, and keeping a lighthearted aplomb even when her partner nearly lost his grip on the fish dive in the final pas de deux. I’m told that slower tempi on opening night may have been a challenge for the first cast Aurora, Angelica Generosa. She struggled with turns and had some near-miss moments (others speculated that the rather large tiaras were throwing her off). Her strength is a gracious, soft upper body, a projection of wholeness and calm. What I miss from her, though, is dynamic contrast.

Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan and Christopher D’Ariano in Peter Boal’s new staging of “The Sleeping Beauty.” Photograph by Angela Sterling

To me, and I’m presuming to other ballet lovers who aren’t quite fanatic enough to spend weeks poring over Harvard’s Sergeyev Collection of notations, the conversation around this staging is also wonderfully educational. Did you know that “Sleeping Beauty’s” premiere in 1890 didn’t include a wedding pas de deux variation for the prince, because the dancer, Pavel Gerdt, didn’t have the technique for it? But Boal and Fullington have included the variation for the prince developed later, and what a wonder it is danced by the rising young soloist Christopher D’Ariano, who is tall and long but remarkably unified in his movements—like Biasucci, not just executing steps cleanly, but making magical illusions of them.

This staging has a lot of moments when conventional steps are done with a coupé positioning of the working leg with the knee slightly bent, the foot placed clearly against the ankle—actually, a remarkable number of steps like this! D’Ariano had a series of tours en l’air with that coupé leg, going straight into an attitude hold that he took remarkably calmly after the big jump, like the easiest breath of air. And his run of brisés volé surpassed the Bluebirds I saw in the wedding divertissements. Actually, the Bluebird’s consort Princess Florine upstaged the Bluebird in each of the three casts I caught (Juliet Prine was especially clear and luscious in the role), although Tazewell’s wonderful Bluebird costume with a cape for wings more than compensated.

The six fairy variations in the Christening prologue are short opportunities for dancers to distinguish themselves, and many did, particularly Ashton Edwards as the fluttery Canary fairy on opening night, but more than that the fairies at PNB collectively showed a high level of classicism throughout the company—the pointework was across the board impeccable. Then there’s that other fairy, the angry Carabosse. She’s one of the most delicious character roles in all classical ballets, and PNB’s new production gives her a spectacular black-winged costume and a retinue of more than a dozen puppet rats. But the costume also covers her face in a mask, making it hard to read her acting—unless the dancer in the role is Zsilas Michael Hughes. They acted with their hips, their shoulders, and their mouth, which seems capable of endless exuberant expressions, and the moment when they told the King and Queen, “Stay there, I’m coming back to deal with you in a minute,” rang louder than any spoken dialogue—this Carabosse was the pissed-off mother every child knows not to mess with.

A few final notes: the big Garland Dance, which really should be an emotional bright spot, was curiously flat at all three performances I saw; nobody up there was smiling or seemed to want to be dancing that waltz, which was most strange—aren’t those professional division students from the school eager to be taking the stage? And let’s talk for a second about the court falling asleep for a hundred years: Isn’t this at the heart of the story’s magic? Isn’t it an amazement, and a horror, to think a whole society could just lie down and sleep on the spot, dust and cobwebs covering their inert bodies? Doesn’t that image of the whole kingdom held hostage to a spell a large part of what makes us care about the prince making it to the castle? But we don’t see the court fall asleep in Fullington and Boal’s production. Instead, the Lilac Fairy ushers everyone off, and we glimpse just a few of the last stragglers yawning and dropping their heads.

A week after seeing this new “Beauty,” I’m grateful for the fantasy respite of a well-governed kingdom. And I’m holding in mind the specter of a society paralyzed by a vengeful spell for 100 years—hoping we will each find the magic of a personal Lilac Fairy to gird our determination, lead us through the forest, and give us the fortitude to break the spell.

Rachel Howard

Rachel Howard is the former lead dance critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. Her dance writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Hudson Review, Ballet Review, San Francisco Magazine and Dance Magazine.

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Beauty goes Big

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Rachel Howard

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