TV REVIEWS : ‘Still Life’ Fable by the Royal Ballet

Local balletomanes will recall David Bintley’s “Still Life at the Penguin Cafe” as an overproduced, under-choreographed ecological fable danced brightly by the Royal Ballet of Covent Garden at the Orange County Performing Arts Center two years ago.

This whimsical one-act tribute to endangered species (including our own) comes to Bravo cable at 4 and 11 p.m. today in a resourceful studio production directed by Bintley and Keith Beckett. Indeed, the arbitrary and disorienting cuts between extreme close-ups and panoramic long shots help camouflage the greatest weakness in the choreography: Bintley’s inability to match the developmental ingenuity of Simon Jeffes’ music.

Instead, he adds dry postmodern semaphore to fey character dancing borrowed, in large part, from Frederick Ashton’s “Tales of Beatrix Potter.” Inevitably, however, his contribution becomes eclipsed by the spectacle provided by designer Hayden Griffin, for this is a dance divertissement featuring a full set-change for nearly every solo, plus a cast costumed and masked to resemble such creatures as the Southern Cape Zebra, the Texan Kangaroo Rat, the Brazilian Woolly Monkey and Humbolt’s Hog-nosed Skunk Flea.

No swans, bluebirds, cats or the rest of the usual ballet fauna, but we do get a White Ram pas de deux, as well as actor Jeremy Irons reading a lament for the extinction of the Great Auk. And the Royal Ballet principals all rise to the occasion with dancing of impressive vigor as well as sweetness.

Watch for Fiona Brockway as the antic flea, Bruce Sansom in the exhausting rat solo; Phillip Broomhead as the sinewy Zebra, Stephen Jefferies as the dapper Monkey and Jonathan Cope as a human Rainforest refugee. Deborah Bull dances the Ram--or was it Deborah Ram dancing the Bull?