Saturday night was not your average night at the ballet.
I’ve always enjoyed going to the ballet, but since I began studying it myself five years ago, I’ve been making a concerted effort to get out to San Francisco at least once a season. I’ve been chipping away at the classics that I haven’t seen and this past Saturday found me at the War Memorial Opera House waiting for the curtain to come up on Don Quixote.
I’ve been eager to see this one for quite some time. I read the book in college and I was most interested to see how one takes a doddering, senile, old man and his portly compadre and fashions a ballet around them.
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As it turns out, one introduces a pair of forbidden lovers and then prods the hero into interceding on their behalf, and it worked quite well. It’s fun ballet without the need for ancient curses or suicidal virgins – refreshing. The obligatory vision sequence, though pretty, felt a little out of place, but the pas de deux didn’t put me to sleep and the wedding sequence didn’t go on and on for decades so that’s good news. The choreography is lively, the story is humorous, and the cast is full of good-natured peasant folk, bull-fighters dancing with daggers, and haughty Spanish women demanding to be conquered by their suitors. Add a horse and a donkey on stage (real live animals, if you can imagine) and you are in for a unique night at the ballet.
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The show we saw was unique in yet another dimension. Towards the end of Act I, the prima ballerina injured herself badly enough that she was on the ground and couldn’t get up. Oops. Props to her parter – he didn’t miss a beat. He was across the stage from her at the time of her accident and bounded across the stage to her rescue with such ease and apparent chivalry that it looked like part of the choreography. He scooped her up and whisked her off stage quick as a flash. Very well done. The audience might not have known that anything was amiss, but that the rest of the cast was still on stage and the music was clearly building to some triumphant moment for which the middle of the stage was sadly empty. In a few counts they recovered, exaggerating whatever little steps they were meant to be doing in the background, and pulling forward to fill in the hole at center stage. The conductor bought the music down at the end of the phrase and the curtain dropped on an abbreviated Act I.
They took a 30 minute intermission, in which the roles of Kitri and her lover Basilio were both replaced. While the new Kitri had a little less flare than the first one, both the replacements did a very good job of the pas de deux and the rest of Act II. The tavern scene was very enjoyable too.
For Act III, yet a third Kitri was produced, this time, back with the original Basilio for the finale. This third dancer accidentally dropped her fan at a key moment. Sancho Panza bounded across the stage, triumphantly claiming the prize, and taking it back to his table with him, proceeded to fan himself with it like a proper lady for the remains of the show.
I once found myself on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland when it broke down. Cast members dressed as pirates came to answer our questions, and then eventually to hop into the water to push our boats back to safe exit routes. (Our pirate was named Natalia, I remember. Nice girl.) Though it breaks the magic to see the unpainted backsides of set pieces and the hidden, very ordinary emergency exit doors, it also kind of cool to see how a cast of people come to together in the face of a major problem, and make it work.
Saturday night at the ballet was very much that way. My commendations go to the cast and crew for sailing that ship all the way home.