BALLET REVIEW : S.F. ‘Beauty’ Chooses a Strange Time to Sleep

“The Sleeping Beauty,” as staged last season by Helgi Tomasson for the San Francisco Ballet, is stylish and stimulating. The $745,000 production may stretch company resources to the limit, but the stretch obviously invigorates all concerned.

From lofty ballerina to lowly corps member, the dancers honor the exalted Petipa tradition. Most of Tomasson’s choreographic additions and subtractions make good sense. Jens-Jacob Worsaae has created lavish-looking, ever-tasteful designs that falter only in the would-be magical transformations.

At the Civic Theatre on Tuesday, Denis de Coteau defended Tchaikovsky nobly in the pit, leading a rough but ready pick-up ensemble called the International Symphony Orchestra of Tijuana.

The San Francisco production has been hailed, justifiably, as a thinking person’s “Sleeping Beauty.” For some thinkers, however, it does create certain problems.

Most of them relate to Tomasson’s provocative decision to impose a very specific time and place on the action. The first act makes Princess Aurora an Imperial ingenue in 17th-Century Russia. After Carabosse (here labeled the Fairy of Darkness) does her wicked deed and the heroine-cum-entourage take their 100-year nap, everyone wakes up amid the gallic fripperies of the Baroque court.

The focus on temporal credibility--intended, no doubt, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the “Sleeping Beauty” premiere in St. Petersburg--raises simplistic yet stubbornly irksome questions:

If Aurora was, as we are told, the daughter of the czar, didn’t the somnolent century leave something of a gap in Russian history?

Didn’t anyone usurp the throne while the czar slept?

Could the ruler really open his Byzantine eyes after all those decades, don a powdered wig and proclaim, “I still am czar”?

What, moreover, are all those winged creatures in tutus doing in the literal domain of boyars and Cossacks, the world of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great?

Fairy tales are supposed to be timeless. That is what makes them universally poignant. They are best accommodated in neutral never-never lands. For all his clever invention, Tomasson might have been wise to leave Godunov alone.

Still. . . .

In these days of tired traditions and nostalgic corruptions, one must be grateful for a production that has a fresh point of view, however wrong-headed. And one must be grateful for a production that is so sensitively executed.

Sabina Allemann, remembered in Southern California for her feverish Tatiana and quizzical Alice with the National Ballet of Canada, dominated--and validated--the evening as Aurora. Womanly rather than girlish, she exuded radiance at the heroine’s coming-out party, ethereal mystery in the oddly rechoreographed vision scene and grandiose rapture at the ultimate wedding celebration.

She moved through the ornate scenic jungle with smiling determination and staggering technical security. She phrased with lyrical purity throughout, made the clock stop in the balances of the Rose Adagio, and threw herself into the classic fishdives of the finale with reckless bravado masquerading as innocence. She is a ballerina--the rare, real thing.

Ashley Wheater, formerly a Joffrey hero, partnered her attentively as a tall, strong, uncommonly aristocratic and somewhat mannered Prince Desire. Pascale Leroy, formerly a Petit soloist in Marseilles, introduced an elegant if less-than-magnetic Lilac Fairy.

In the Bluebird divertissement, the piquant refinement of Elizabeth Loscavio nicely offset the airy glee of Andre Reyes. Galina Alexandrova, formerly of the Bolshoi, attracted special attention among the splendid supporting dancers as a fleet secondary fairy and as a genuinely seductive feline.

Tomasson has toned up the mime episodes while toning down the traditional caricature. Under the circumstances, Anita Paciotti emerged as a forceful but hardly grotesque Carabosse, and Tomm Ruud lost nary a hair as the put-upon Cattalabutte.

The San Diego audience, which left about a third of the 3,000 seats empty, mustered no applause for the ballerina’s entrance. The enthusiasm level rose appreciably, however, soon thereafter.