Don Quixote at the SF Ballet

On Saturday, San Francisco Ballet revived their production of Don Quixote, an 1869 Russian Grand Ballet with choreography by Marius Petipa and music by Ludwig Minkus. The French-born Petipa was the most influential choreographer of the second half of the 19th century from his perch as Ballet Master of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres. Minkus was a Viennese violinist and composer who took a job in the orchestra at the Bolshoi and eventually made his way to being Official Composer of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres. Somehow I have gone through life without seeing a single one of their famous collaborations, and it was odd to attend my first last Saturday evening while Russia was invading Ukraine.

Whenever Minkus is mentioned in reviews of ballet productions, his music is usually affectionately dismissed. The score to Don Quixote is total schlock, a Viennese Jew writing French ballet music for a Russian audience while embroidering it with Spanish touches. It's also outrageously fun, eminently danceable schlock, one bouncy tune after another. Minkus retired in the early 1890s and moved back to Vienna with a small pension from Russia but he lived into his early 90s and World War I intervened. The sad finale to his Wikipedia entry is: "Minkus later relocated to an apartment in the Gentzgasse where he spent his final years alone and in utter poverty, his wife having died in 1895, and the events of World War I having cut off his pension from Russia." It seems that a pension from Russia has always been a precarious proposition.

Don Quixote has never been one of my favorite stories, from the novel to various operas to Man of La Mancha, so it was a delight to find that in this ballet, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are minor comic characters who wander through a town where everyone dances, all the time.

Jim Sohm and Pascal Molat were extraordinary young dancers in the 1970s and 1980s at SF Ballet, and it was a treat to see they could still move so beautifully. As the Don and Sancho, their comic schtick throughout the evening was sweet, understated and occasionally even funny. (All production photos by Erik Tomasson.)

The real leads are a young couple, danced by Angelo Greco and Misa Kuranaga, who go through a few slight obstacles on their way to being wed. They rocked their red outfits and the white ones in the third act too. The original SF Ballet Helgi Tomasson production is from 2003 but he upgraded the sets and costumes in 2012 with designer Martin Pakledenaz, who was dying of a brain tumor. Heather Lockard, his Associate Costume Designer, needs her own accolade because the costumes were some of the most strikingly beautiful I've seen at the ballet.

On top of 152 separate roles, there were other couples galore, including my favorite dancer of the evening, Esteban Hernandez, as King of the Gypsies...

...and his Queen of the Gypsies, Ellen Rose Hummel, who looked like she was channeling Martha Graham at certain moments.

Sarah Van Patten, who has just announced her retirement, was my favorite ballerina of the evening, and Luke Ingham looked smashing as her toreador.

The entire production is surprisingly entertaining, and the audience enjoyed it with an almost-post-Covid-infused intensity. It's playing all this week with rotating casts. Personal favorite, Joseph Walsh, in Cast #2.