Bolshoi’s Daring ‘Quixote’

Although the Bolshoi Ballet rid itself of longtime artistic director Yuri Grigorovich some 18 months ago, his ballets dominate the repertory of the company’s current American tour. The Bolshoi engagement in Shrine Auditorium began last Wednesday with Grigorovich’s terminally misconceived 1969 “Swan Lake” and, on Saturday, the company turned to his “Don Quixote,” a staging new to America that he created in 1994 on the ballet’s 125th anniversary.

Grigorovich is best known as a radical and arguably perverse revisionist, the man who removed character dance and mime from “Swan Lake,” the balcony from the balcony scene in “Romeo and Juliet” and the Nutcracker from “The Nutcracker” (substituting a bloated rag doll). However, this “Don Quixote” may be his finest ballet ever seen in this country--much finer, ironically, than the version for American Ballet Theatre staged by Grigorovich’s Bolshoi successor, Vladimir Vasiliev.

For starters, it uses a full three hours to give you more of this much revised Petipa and Gorsky patchwork than you ever knew existed: more attempts to keep the title character front and center, more data on the love life of the matador Espada, more splashy specialty dances with no plot-relevance whatsoever and lots more music by Minkus--conducted on Saturday with impressive flair by Alexander Sotnikov.

More dancers, too: 60 in the finale, including two separate, exemplary corps of 12 couples each. But the remarkable afterglow of this production isn’t due just to the spectacle or even the unflagging vitality of the company. Much of it can be credited to the elegance of the treatment--especially from veteran designer Valery Levental, who has given Grigorovich the layers of scenic panels he loves to manipulate but has enforced a pictorial style at once formal and full of life. This style accommodates all the extremes in the ballet, all the conflicts between Petipa’s St. Petersburg nobility and Gorsky’s Moscow realism that make the ballet so rich and problematic.

Beyond merely balancing these extremes, Grigorovich heightens them into a potent theatrical rhythm. One moment you’re watching the Don’s story, then Kitri’s, and then one of the choreographic wild cards (new people, pure movement) that keep this staging seeming like an inspired card trick, anything but plot-driven. Indeed, its greatest weaknesses come in narrative passages: the destruction of the puppet show, for instance, and, later, the mock suicide of Basil. Mostly, however, Grigorovich preserves everything in “Don Quixote” that audiences have always loved, finds ways to retell some episodes in dance rather than mime--but accepts the limits he never recognized with “Swan Lake.”

Finally, he gives the Bolshoi Ballet a vehicle in which the enormous double-corps supports no less than two dozen soloists, some of them mostly confined to acting (the intense Andrei Sitnikov in the title role, for example), but most of them dancing full out in classical, Spanish or gypsy style as if auditioning for ballet heaven.

As Kitri, Galina Stepanenko displayed incredibly fast and percussive pointe-work, a soaring jump, fouette facility galore and, most remarkable of all, the ability to seem perfectly calm and centered at the end of nearly every bravura passage. Opposite her, the immensely likable and accomplished Yuri Klevtsov had everything for a world-class Basil but temperament, individuality, star quality. Except when doing something phenomenal--prolonged one-armed lifts, flying splits out of a turn--he remained strangely easy to overlook.

In contrast, the charismatic Alexei Popovchenko didn’t dance half as expertly but made merely walking across the stage seem a major event--the hottest Espada seen locally since the late Patrick Bissell, to whom Popovchenko bears a creepy resemblance. Among the bullfighter’s conquests, Erika Luzina adroitly dispatched the obstacle-course solo of Act 1 (with wine mugs on the floor marking her path instead of the customary daggers), while Elena Volkova, Irina Dmitrieva and others kept him--and us--happily distracted in the Act 2 tavern scene.

Anna Antonicheva brought little beyond dry rectitude to the combined role of Dulcinea and the Dryad Queen, but Marianne Rizhkina offered warmth and refined technique as Cupid. Hidden under grunge makeup in the tavern jig were three of the Bolshoi’s flashiest virtuosos: Ruslan Pronin, Mikhail Sharkov and Igor Yurlov.

Mime specialists included Alexander Petuhov, tireless as Sancho Panza; Andrei Melanin, overwrought as a Gamache with a trick knee; Alexei Loparevich, gesticulating wildly but largely lost among the teeming multitudes as Lorenzo.

* The Bolshoi Ballet dances Bournonville’s “La Sylphide” at 8 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday in Shrine Auditorium, 649 W. Jefferson Blvd. Tickets: $30-$95. (213) 480-3232 or (888) BOLSHOI.