TV REVIEW : PBS’ 18-Minute Trim Hurts the Royal’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’

How would you feel if your favorite movie were shown on PBS with 18 minutes missing--and the only “Edited for Television” warning was buried in technical credits at the very end?

That’s what happens to the controversial 1994 Royal Ballet staging of “Sleeping Beauty” tonight on PBS’ “Great Performances” series. This year-old performance was shown complete in England and since September has been available in the American video market from Home Vision of Chicago. But PBS insisted that it fit in two hours, so the opening of Acts 1 and 2--plus other passages in other places--ended up on the cutting-room floor.

This isn’t the first time that PBS has tampered with the acknowledged masterwork of Imperial Russian classicism. In 1972, for instance, a Rudolf Nureyev/National Ballet of Canada “Sleeping Beauty” was chopped to 90 minutes.

But the recent PBS abridgments of the Royal “La Bayadere,” the Mark Morris “Hard Nut,” the New York City Ballet “Jazz: Six Syncopated Movements” and this “Sleeping Beauty” do raise the question: Exactly how great does a dance performance have to be in order for it to be telecast complete on “Great Performances”?

Since “Sleeping Beauty” has long been a touchstone of British classical style, the uproar over Anthony Dowell’s production hasn’t focused on dancing so much as design: specifically the spatial distortions and decorative clutter imposed by Maria Bjornson, best known for “Phantom of the Opera.”

Indeed, Bjornson’s warped scenic perspectives create the illusion that you are seeing the ballet through a hole in the stage floor and her gigantic oval frame at the back plays havoc with all the straight lines, and limbs, of the choreography. TV director Colin Nears mitigates the damage, but there are moments when the dancers blend into the furniture and only end-of-the-century Mannerism is on view.

Darcey Bussell was the original Aurora in this staging, but injury caused the telecast to go to Viviana Durante, an important dramatic and lyrical dancer but none too distinctive here--even though the camera does enhance her small-scale sweetness. Her balances are fine in the Rose Adagio, but jumps are continually unreliable and, overall, there’s an edge of strain to her dancing even when it’s perfectly correct.

The telecast provides possibly the last Royal showcase for the tall, handsome and reckless Zoltan Solymosi, who left the company less than a month ago--”sent packing back to Hungary,” according to the London Observer, “after a disagreement with the management over the virtues of George Balanchine’s 1928 choreography [for “Apollo”].”

As Florimund, Solymosi partners strongly, solos unevenly, exudes just the right aristocratic, high-Romantic yearning in the Vision Scene, but grows strangely fatuous at his wedding.

Dowell makes a commanding Carabosse, Benazir Hussein a notably serene Lilac Fairy and William Trevitt an impressive exponent of Royal virtuosity in the last-act Gold variation. The Bluebirds? Don’t ask.

Barry Wordsworth conducts expertly.

* The PBS “Great Performances” abridgment of the Royal Ballet “Sleeping Beauty” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.