TV REVIEW : Royal Winnipeg Ballet in ‘The Big Top’

Quick, name a ballet that ends with a young girl waking from a glittering but also menacing dream to hug her favorite doll.

If you answered “The Nutcracker,” you’re right. If you answered “The Big Top,” you’re also right.

Jacques Lemay’s hourlong circus remake of “The Nutcracker” for Royal Winnipeg Ballet turns up on Bravo tonight at 6 and midnight, with music by Victor Davies replacing Tchaikovsky’s score and designs by Mary Robinson Kerr creating a spectacular dream world.

Created in 1986 and seen here in a studio performance taped two years later, “The Big Top” first shows us little Beth (Leslie Fields) in a sepia-tinted town filled with quirky characters: “Twin Peaks” on pointe. Soon, however, a magical transformation delivers her to a blazingly colorful circus tent where the performers, somehow, keep resembling people she knows.

Backstage, she’s threatened by both a lion and a lion-tamer, then defended by a clown who looks exactly like her doll--but you get the idea.

Unfortunately, the idea is sometimes all you get. Lemay’s classical choreography invariably looks flat and spatially constricted, provoking unfavorable comparisons to better-known circus ballets. His teetering acrobats pale next to those in Massine’s “Parade,” for example, and the solo for Sugar Plum surrogate Evelyn Hart proves utterly unworthy of her.

The demi-caractere divertissements, however, are often charming--especially the snake trio the poodles and big cats. Besides Hart and Fields, the principal dancers include Svea Eklof, David Peregrine, Andre Lewis and Stephen Hyde. Norman Campbell directs expertly, combining stage and video effects.