Frankenstein at SF Ballet

Late to the party again, I finally saw the San Francisco Ballet production of the full-length, story ballet version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein last Saturday evening. Created in 2016-17 by British choreographer Liam Scarlett as a co-production of London's Royal Ballet and the San Francisco Ballet, it's an ambitious, colorful, striking work. Scarlett was a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet before retiring in his mid-twenties to become a full-time choreographer. Frankenstein was his first full-length ballet which was an immediate, popular hit with audiences but left a lot of critics kvetching. (Click here for the late Alan Ulrich's review of the SF premiere.)

Scarlett proceeded to create ballets all over the world for the next four years until accusations of "sexual impropriety" involving male dancers surfaced in 2019. The British tabloids were at their worst and implied that he'd been molesting minors, which turned out to be bunkum. The succeeding, years-long investigation cleared him of all charges, but it was too late. Scarlett resigned his position with the Royal Ballet and companies around the world dropped his ballets from their repertories. With his career over, and after a year of hiding away during the COVID pandemic, Scarlett hung himself in his own flat, dying at the age of 35. Tamara Rojo, SF Ballet's Director who was in charge of the English National Ballet at the time, was quoted in Dance Australia: "The world is a much darker, uglier, nastier place without you [Liam] in it."

In the Ulrich review, he noted that "Scarlett has said how eager he was for San Francisco Ballet to have the piece because of dancers Joseph Walsh and Frances Chung." Eight years after the premiere, the two dancers reprised their roles as Victor Frankenstein and his doomed fiance Elizabeth Valenza, and it was an absolute treat seeing this dynamic duo from the original cast dancing on Saturday night. (All production photos are by Lindsey Rallo.)

Before his suicide, Scarlett left a bequest naming five "trustees" to oversee his legacy, including Joseph Walsh and his wife Lauren Strongin, a recently retired soloist at the SF Ballet who danced in a number of Scarlett ballets. So on top of performing Victor Frankenstein, Walsh along with Strongin have been staging the four different casts that have been performing Frankenstein earlier this year and in the final "encore" week to end the season. Walsh is one of my favorite dancers, with an ability to go from utter stillness to fluid motion without any visible transition, a skill that reminds me of Buster Keaton at times. (Click here for an interesting interview with Walsh and how crazy it has been trying to be both dancer and stager at the same time.)

The original production by John Macfarlane is both spectacular and stark, with the medical students anatomy theater looking like something out of the recent film Poor Things. The ensemble dance with students waving around body parts was a bit bizarre, but it effectively takes the audience from the opening scenes of genteel Swiss aristocracy into the realm of horror. The reanimation of The Creature at the end of Act One was a genuine coup de theatre and it packed a jolt.

This is the third time Wei Wang has been in this production as The Creature and he owns the role. Creepy, alluring, pathetic, and frightening all manage to come across in his performance, and the scene where he accidentally kills the 7-year-old William Frankenstein is the most powerful in the ballet. On Saturday night, William was danced by the extraordinarily precocious Bode Jay Nanola, who was amazing.

The huge musical score is by New York composer Lowell Liebermann, whose music I had never heard before. His template seemed to be the late ballets of Prokofiev (Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella), and though Liebermann doesn't have the melodic and rhythmic genius of Prokofiev (few composers do), the score was colorful, attuned to the action, and eminently serviceable. My hope is that Ms. Rojo brings back more of Liam Scarlett's ballets, some of which he created for the San Francisco Ballet, especially since the company already has two official "stagers" in Lauren Strongin and Joseph Walsh.

Hans van Manen at the SF Ballet

Hans van Manen is a 92-year-old Dutch choreographer who I had never heard of before. After seeing four of his dances at the SF Ballet on Wednesday, I am now a total fan.

Hans van Manen began choreographing in the late 1950s for the Netherlands' one television station, then joined the Nederlands Dans Theater and the Dutch National Ballet where he has created over 150 dances in a very long career. Pictured above is from the first work on the program, the 1971 Grosse Fugue to string quartet music by Beethoven, which still looks startlingly modern. (Pictured above are Dores André and Fernando Carratalá Coloma. All production photos are by Chris Hardy.)

The choreography is arrestingly earthbound, with lots of squats, twirls, and angular extensions but not so much flying in the air as is usual for classical ballet. The movement is often similar for both men and women, anticipating and possibly influencing Mark Morris.

The newest work on the program was the 2012 Variations for Two Couples, a short 15-minute dollop of elegance danced to a conglomeration of modern string music. The finale had the two couples finally joining each other, rather like the ending of Gross Fugue where all the disparate groupings eventually join together in an abstract ballet version of a group hug. (Pictured are Aaron Robison, Frances Chung Joseph Walsh, and Sasha Mukhamedov.)

This was followed by the wildest and funniest piece of the evening, the 8-minute Solo from 1997, set to a recorded performance of an insanely fast J.S. Bach Partita for Violin. The title could have been Tag Team, since it actually consists of a trio of male dancers who form a relay onstage, performing one virtuoso feat after another. Rachel Veaujean, who was staging these works for the SF Ballet, stated, "Solo is very virtuoso, very grounded, and super fast. At the very first rehearsal, nobody can do it, it's a mad little marathon." On Wednesday evening, it was danced spectacularly by Lleyton Ho, Luca Ferro, and Archie Sullivan. (Pictured is Cavan Conley from opening night.)

The final ballet was the 1977 5 Tango's set to a score by Astor Piazzola that was also danced to a recording rather than a live orchestra, which robbed the piece of a lot of its impact. The five-movement ballet is mostly amusing for not actually having a tango onstage, but instead approximations and variations on the Argentine national dance.

The fourth movement starts as an erotic duet for two male dancers before two women arrive on the scene. As there was no real biographical information about Hans van Manen in the program, on returning home I asked Google, "Is Hans van Manen gay?" and found a link to an article in the Holland Gay News entitled Hans van Manen, Streetwise Gay Icon. A biography in Dutch of van Manen was recently published and the article summarizes the wild life of a starving, post-World War Two teenager who made his way in Amsterdam's dance world while being publicly open about his abundant gay sex life during the 1960s and 1970s, before it was safe to do so. (Pictured are Fernando Carratalá Coloma and Victor Prigent.)

Although Hans van Manen is a venerable Queer Icon who I should have known about earlier, the real discovery is his marvelous choreography. There are four more performances of the program at the SF Ballet, including tonight (Friday, April 11), and you can get tickets by clicking here. (Pictured is a young Hans van Manen.)

Raymonda at the SF Ballet

Your chances of seeing a live production of the full-length, 1898 Russian ballet Raymonda, with choreography by Marius Petipa and music by Alexander Glazunov, are exceedingly slim. The SF Ballet is currently presenting a lavish production that was originally conceived and choreographed by Tamara Rojo for the English National Ballet in 2022, just before she arrived in San Francisco to become the company's new Artistic Director. It's easy to see why the ballet is so rarely performed anymore as it requires a huge cast and orchestra, and for the three principal roles, a level of dancing difficulty that ranks with some of the most demanding in the classical repertory. Plus, the characters are one-dimensional and the original storyline is casually Islamophobic, with the Saracen guest wanting to kidnap and rape the virginal heroine before being thwarted and killed by her Christian Crusader fiance. (All production photos are by Lindsay Thomas.)

Rojo changed the narrative for the better, though it sometimes doesn't make much sense. The time and setting was moved from medieval Hungary to 19th Century England and Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Instead of hanging out in a Hungarian castle for the first act, we watch Raymonda (Sasha De Sola) as she quickly leaves her upper-class British home and follows her soldier fiance John de Bryan to Crimea, where she joins a nursing unit a la Florence Nightingale.

The nurses and soldiers are given sensational dances, but the happy music did seem a bit odd in this context. As my companion Austin remarked, "Wow! I guess war is fun and there's lots of dancing."

The colorful musical score by Glazunov is considered one of his best works, and it's eminently danceable, but much of it sounded like second-rate Tchaikovsky to me. What was fabulous was the playing of the orchestra under conductor Martin West, not to mention the live cimbalom in the last act for Raymonda's final solo. (Pictured are horn players Logan Bryck and Brian McCarty in the orchestra pit.)

The hour-long first act tends to drag in any production (there are YouTube versions from the Bolshoi and La Scala), but things pick up considerably in Act Two when Abdur Rahman (an exuberant Fernando Carratalá Coloma), the exotic Ottoman officer, gives a party in a tent for the ailing soldiers and their attending nurses.

There are wonderful dances from various nations and quite a bit of seductive movement from Rahman and Raymonda. In other words, think of Rudolph Valentino as The Sheikh. As Rachel Howard points out in her SF Chronicle review, "like pretty much every full “Raymonda” production, it’s about sublimated sexual fantasies."

The final act, which is often performed as a separate chunk, is the wedding party with a lot of "character" dancing, which I am assuming means ballet versions of folk dancing. Cleverly, the revised libretto specifies "Hungarian Workers" at the English estate where Raymonda is to marry John de Bryan. However, in this version, Raymonda pulls a Nora in A Doll's House and abruptly exits at the end of the ballet, leaving her betrothed on the altar after dancing with him for 30 minutes. It doesn't really work but it doesn't matter.

Seemingly the entire company is dancing in this production, and they are looking great. Although the three principals on Saturday's opening were very good, there weren't any real superstar moments where the audience holds their breath and can hardly believe their own eyes. There are three other casts rotating into the roles and I am tempted to return to the opera house to check them out. (Click here for the SF Ballet casting site.)

The Nutcracker at the San Francisco Ballet

My Civic Center neighborhood turns into a Nutcracker factory during the month of December, with two performances a day of the Tchaikovsky ballet.

Every day dancers stream in and out of the San Francisco Ballet building on the corner of Fulton and Franklin...

...along with confused ballet patrons who don't realize that the show is actually across the street at the War Memorial Opera House.

We went to the Monday, December 23rd evening performance and had a wonderful time.

Though there were a few children in Monday's audience...

...who were being bought souvenir nutcrackers for Christmas...

...most of the crowd were adults...

...seemingly on date nights...

...with many dressed to the nines.

The cast changes for every performance and are only announced via signage in the lobby since injury, illness, and artistic discretion are all involved in who appears onstage in any particular performance.

In Swan Dive, a frank, funny and profane memoir or her career at New York City Ballet, the ballerina Georgina Pazcoguin wrote: "Although there are many who love dancing the Nutcracker, I have done it for the last twenty years because it's my job. The Nutcracker represents the tradition of paying your dues and proving how tough, how compliant, and how impervious to exhaustion you really are. Each new corps member and apprentice is expected to perform in every performance. Every. Single. One. The first Nutcracker season is the ultimate rite of passage for a new dancer, and only the strongest survive. Over the course of the season, the theater itself becomes a cesspool of injury and sickness. Our ties with friends and family are pushed to the limit--and our undying devotion to the ballet comes into question. This is why I affectiontely call it the NUTBUSTER."

I have no idea whether conditions are similar at the San Francisco ballet, but it is a grueling schedule and the peril of routine is ever-present. However, we got lucky on Monday night with a fabulous, committed cast and a great, enthusiastic audience. The guest conductor was Marc Taddei, above, and he led the SF Ballet Orchestra in a smooth, beautifully detailed rendering of Tchaikovsky's musical score.

The Helgi Tomasson production is 20 years old but it was looking spruced up a bit, along with some of the choreography, presumably by the new artistic director Tamara Rojo. What really elevated the performance beyond the ordinary was the dancing of Nikisha Fogo and Max Cauthorn, above. Fogo in particular was breathtaking and took the final Grand Pas de Deux to a zone of pure excitement.

You can catch one of the remaining eight performances from the 26th to 29th at the War Memorial Opera House, and they even seem to be offering a Post-Christmas sale on tickets at their website here.

A Midsummer NIght's Dream at the SF Ballet

The San Francisco Ballet is currently presenting George Balanchine's 1962 dance version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in a lavish production borrowed from the Paris Opera Ballet. It was designed by Christian Lacroix using a reported one million Swarovski crystals, and my mind kept jumping to "It's Lacroix sweetie, Lacroix!" from the British comedy Absolutely Fabulous. Using a mixture of Mendelssohn's incidental music to the play along with additional pieces by the composer, Balanchine crafted a clever condensation of the entire theatrical work into an hour-long story ballet. Pictured above in production photos by Lindsay Thomas are Esteban Hernández as Oberon, King of the Fairies and Sasha de Sola as Titania, Queen of the Fairies just as war is breaking out between them and their followers over who gets to have a new pretty boy in their retinue.

Two years before Balanchine, the English composer Benjamin Britten wrote an operatic version of A Midsummer Night's Dream that is one of my all-time favorite operas. Like Balanchine, Britten and his collaborator Peter Pears jettisoned the first act of the play and plunged us directly into the forest for a night of misalliances, confusion, and magic gone awry in Fairyland. The chorus in the opera is written for boy sopranos and in the ballet there is a large contingent of fairies danced by young girls. They were skillfully enchanting at the ballet's opening night last Tuesday, and sported the most colorful Lacroix costumes of the evening.

The queer subtext in Shakespeare's play is present throughout the Britten opera, but not so much in the Balanchine adaptation, though Oberon and Titania never do dance together. Titania instead has a long duet with her "Cavalier," danced superbly by Aaron Robison, while Oberon spends most of his time with the young trickster Puck, in an athletically amusing performance by Cavan Conley.

The confusing who's-in-love-with-who quartet of Helena, Hermia, Lysander, and Demetrius was more clearly delineated than usual as Puck keeps putting love potions into the wrong pair of eyeballs. (Pictured above are Elizabeth Mateer as Helena and Steven Morse as Demetrius.)

The heart of the play is the sweetly grotesque pairing of Titania and the low tradesman Bottom, whose head has been turned into a donkey. Alexis Francisco Valdes as Bottom was completely darling as a half-donkey being taught how to dance by Titania, Queen of the Fairies.

Near the end of the first act, Nikisha Fogo made a welcome appearance as Hipollyta, Queen of the Amazons, leaping through the air as if she could conquer the world.

In the second act, the ballet dispensed with the story altogether and reverted back to what I think of as Balanchine architectural abstraction.

Though I missed the Pyramus and Thisbe lampoon of tragic theater turned into comedy by amateur actors, Balanchine abstraction is always welcome. The act was highlighted by Isaac Hernández and Frances in a long Divertissement, with some of my favorite dancing of the evening.

The ballet has four more performances this week. Click here to check out the details.

British Icons at the SF Ballet

Everything was beautiful at the San Francisco Ballet last week when they presented their second program of the season, British Icons.

They were presenting two ballets from the early 1960s by a pair of British choreographers, Sir Kenneth MacMillan and Sir Frederick Ashton, whose work has been more known through reputation than actually seen in San Francisco. The gentleman above was attending the show for the second night in a row because he was so enamored of the hour-long Mahler song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde, which forms the score for MacMillan's Song of the Earth.

The woman above had seen the ballet 40 years ago performed by the Royal Ballet and had flown to San Francisco from Southern California just to revisit it.

The song cycle is one of Mahler's last works, with a tenor and an alto singing alternate movements depicting drunken revelry and pastoral joys before leaving the world through death in the long, final Abschied movement . The texts were loosely based on Chinese poetry translated by German writers, with the music and the choreography occasionally gesturing toward the Eastern pentatonic scale. The hour-long score is almost unrelievedly dark, and Mahler supposedly confessed to conductor Bruno Walter, when hesitating about putting the piece before the public, "Won't people go home and shoot themselves?" (All production photos are by Lindsey Rallo.)

Although most of the ballet was abstract, there was a slender narrative involving a male protagonist being gently stalked by Death and taken away from his female counterpart. (Pictured above are Isaac Hernández, Wei Wang, and Wona Park from opening night. We saw the final performance where Joseph Walsh and Esteban Hernández assumed the two male leads.)

The dancing and the choreography were consistently fascinating but the real thrill for me was hearing the music played so well by the SF Ballet Orchestra under conductor Martin West, and the two wonderful young singers, Gabrielle Beteag and Moisés Salazar, whose voices easily soared over the huge orchestra. Beteag (above) in particular was extraordinary, filling the huge opera house with creamy, impassioned sound.

The second ballet, Marguerite and Armand, was created by Ashton for the pairing of Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn at the Royal Ballet, and from this short YouTube clip, it's easy to see why it was a sensation. Coming after Song of the Earth, however, this condensed version of the Camille story that's the basis of the opera La Traviata felt a bit silly and trivial. It probably should have opened the evening rather than ended it.

The music was fun, though, an orchestration of Franz Liszt's 1853 piano sonata in b-minor, played with verve by Britton Day (above).

The new Artistic Director of the company, Tamara Rojo, appeared onstage at the final curtain call, microphone in hand. We were wondering if she was going to say something about the recently revealed $60 million anonymous donation by a longtime patron of the ballet who was thrilled by the new energy and direction that Rojo is bringing to the company. Instead, she was there to announce the elevation of a Soloist to Principal Dancer, something I have never seen done onstage before.

The announcement seemed to come as a total surprise for Jasmine Jimison, who had just danced the role of Marguerite with partner Isaac Hernández as Armand. (Both are pictured above with conductor Martin West.) It was a lovely moment for the ballerina and the audience besides.