A Fairy-Tale Ending AGAIN?

Matthew Bourne has been to Broadway and back, and he can’t wait to get to L.A.

“It’s nice coming to a place where people are very caring and welcoming,” says the choreographer by phone from London. It has been two years since the U.S. premiere--at the Music Center’s Ahmanson Theatre--of Bourne’s irreverent version of “Swan Lake,” in which he made male beasts of the sacred swans and brought dance theater to the masses. “The audiences were incredibly warm. Los Angeles really took the company to its heart.”

Indeed. “Swan Lake” played to 90%-filled houses for its seven-week run here and caused a sensation that went beyond the high-arts crowd. It stirred up a heated debate about the piece’s sexual undertones. Male swans were plastered on the city’s buses, and Hollywood stars came out to ask Bourne--once an avid autograph collector--for his own John Hancock. Although the production went on to open on Broadway in the fall of ‘98, where it ran for 17 weeks (unprecedented for a ballet) and is being touted as a multiple Tony contender, it wasn’t quite the same, says Bourne.

The Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson Theatre was “very proud to have it [first], and that showed in the way they cared about the piece,” he says. “In New York, it was just like another show--carted in and carted out. The pressure of Broadway is incredible, and sometimes it feels less than creative and artistic--like it’s all about money and marketing, more than the actual merit of the show.”

Logistical problems brought Bourne and his company, Adventures in Motion Pictures, to Los Angeles in the first place. “Swan Lake” had packed in crowds in London’s West End in 1996, and Bourne was anxious to try it in America. When it became clear that no theaters would be available on Broadway for months, he settled on the West Coast as a point of entry.

Tonight, Bourne’s latest production, “Cinderella,” an update of the Prokofiev ballet set during the London blitz, begins previews, again at the Ahmanson Theatre. (It opens April 7.) This time, it’s no accident.

“We are hoping to have an ongoing relationship with the Ahmanson, to treat it very much as our American home,” Bourne says. Adventures in Motion Pictures producer and co-director Katharine Dore says the Ahmanson has been a source of moral and financial support. So much so that future AMP productions might even premiere in Los Angeles and then cross the ocean to the West End. The L.A. producers of “Swan Lake” gave AMP enough of a budget to help refurbish sets and costumes and pay for the rehearsal time to refine the production.

“The quality of the show was much, much better than it was in London,” says Dore from AMP headquarters. “It was the first time we were able to do it properly. Quote me on this: It was not the West End that made ‘Swan Lake’ into a world-class production, it was Los Angeles.”

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The hope is that Los Angeles will work the same magic on “Cinderella.”

By the time “Cinderella” first opened, in London in fall of 1997, expectations could not have been higher. Could the Bourne strategy--pushing classical ballet toward theater and vice versa--that had worked so well with “Swan Lake” succeed again? The vehicle was Prokofiev’s score, which has been used many times by choreographers, perhaps the most famous being Frederick Ashton, for London’s Royal Ballet in 1948. Adam Cooper, the sexy lead swan, would again have the male starring role; Royal Ballet principal Sarah Wildor (Cooper’s fiancee in real life) would be Cinderella.

There were a few wrinkles. Bourne got the flu and missed a crucial week of rehearsals. Famed English ballerina Lynn Seymour, who danced the role of the queen in “Swan Lake” and for whom Bourne choreographed the roll of the evil stepmother, fell ill during the fifth week of the run and never returned.

Bourne was so panicky that he couldn’t read the reviews. “Certain phrases go through my mind, and I can’t get them out my head,” he admits, “and they make me terribly depressed.”

In fact, most reviewers once again praised Bourne’s knack for telling a good story, while bemoaning his lack of choreographic range. They agreed that “Cinderella,” although a bit of an anticlimax after the male swans of “Swan Lake,” proved that Bourne wasn’t a one-trick pony.

“Cinderella,” like “Swan Lake,” had been scheduled for a 17-week run in the West End. “Swan Lake,” however, was extended to 21 weeks, making it the longest-running ballet in West End history. In the end, the producers weren’t convinced that “Cinderella” could sell enough tickets to justify an extension.

“The exciting thing was that we could do it again,” he says now. “ ‘Swan Lake’ wasn’t just a one-off, there was an audience for this kind of dance-theater piece, and it was a much bigger audience than a dance company would have.”

Still, Bourne was unhappy with many sections of the production. He may not have read his critics, but he agreed with them--the choreography needed work. Luckily for him, within a week of “Cinderella’s” opening in London, the Ahmanson was on board to produce it here as well. Says Dore: “I knew [even] if we [closed] ‘Cinderella’ four weeks earlier than planned, the show was still going to Los Angeles--it still had another life.”

For its L.A. incarnation, Bourne says that the Ahmanson once again has provided him the added rehearsal time needed to take a fresh look at the show.

“I’m an ideas person,” he says. “All my movement comes through feeling and story and ideas. I don’t have the background, and I’m not as skilled as a lot of other choreographers in just putting together movement. It’s something I really have to work at.”

He says that he and the dancers have worked on filling out the choreography and clarifying the narrative. “We’ve virtually changed everything,” he says. “It’s certainly stronger choreographically. Every section of the show feels like it’s improved 100%.”

“He’s filled it out and made it much richer and fuller,” says Wildor, whose original portrayal of the title role won her good reviews that noted the onstage sparks with Cooper.

The broad outlines of the piece remain the same, however. More love story than fairy tale, Bourne’s version of the classic tale casts Cinderella as a frump in war-torn London in 1940. Her prince isn’t royalty, but a hard-working Royal Air Force pilot. When they find their bliss, it’s as ordinary people.

“I wanted the idea that ultimately theirs was just one of many stories during the war,” Bourne says.

Bourne purposefully cast Cooper--after “Swan Lake,” AMP’s resident sex symbol--against expectation. “My character is completely opposite [from the Swan],” Cooper says. “It’s very hard to make a man with a mustache look sexy. This character is your quintessential Englishman, very reserved, very quiet, very polite, and for most of the ballet, very confused.”

Cooper admits that he does get to be sexy for a bit--in Act 2, during the requisite ball scene, though in this version, the dance takes place only in Cinderella’s fantasies.

Many critics likened “Cinderella” to a silent film. Bourne admits that the movies were a major source of inspiration. “ ‘Cinderella,’ ” Bourne says, is “full of film references that people should enjoy in L.A.” Among them is a main character based on David Niven, the pilot hero of the 1946 film “A Matter of Life and Death” (“Stairway to Heaven” in the U.S.), and a wicked stepmother a la Joan Crawford.

But it’s the ordinary-people quality, and a sense of social history, that for Bourne is the key to modernizing “Cinderella.”

In the end, she isn’t turned into a princess, but a woman. “That’s not very ballet-like,” he says, “to end in that way, but it’s more touching, in a sense. The music absolutely gets you at the end, and there’s two or three sort of big hankie moments. I’ve watched people with tears rolling down their faces,” he says with a naughty giggle. “It’s marvelous.”

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Bourne’s success has won him a devoted following and made him a target of envy and gossip in the British dance world.

“The English hate success,” says Dore. “In this country, we have a lot of very loyal supporters and followers, but within the industry there’s a lot of people who are very skeptical about AMP because we’re successful. [They say], ‘You’re not true to contemporary dance, because people like you and you’re popular.’ ”

AMP has ceased to exist as a normal dance company, with a regular season of touring and new concert works. It has gone from a nonprofit scraping by with government support to a commercial enterprise dependent on shows.

And Bourne has gone from being a choreographer creating dances and solos on a seven-person company to being a bit of an artistic tycoon. He says he spends a lot more time “in the office” these days. “The more well-known the work’s become, the less work I’ve actually done,” he laments.

“Cinderella” was the first AMP project commercially produced from scratch. And last year, AMP began a rare investment plan of selling shares in the company. In one year, the company has raised more than $800,000 by offering shares for as little as just over $800. Dore says that she recently wrote checks that will give investors--15% of which are from the U.S.--a 10% return on their investment. Dore, who has been Bourne’s business partner for 12 years, says she now spends the majority of her time looking for new investors.

But Bourne insists that doesn’t mean they’re rolling in dough. “It’s always touch-and-go, basically,” he says. “We’re always just about getting by.”

While AMP’s decision to go 100% commercial with the “Cinderella” production meant that it no longer qualified for government support, AMP is currently applying to the Arts Council for funding to help it to tour “Swan Lake” and “Cinderella” around Britain, which is an Arts Council mission and a chance for AMP to expand its audience. The expansion is all part of a grand scheme: Dore is trying to raise the funds for a world tour of “Swan Lake.” (Cooper’s brother Simon--a dancer with London’s Ballet Rambert who took over for his injured brother during the West End run--and American Ballet Theatre dancer Ethan Stiefel are possible Cooper replacements in the role of the Swan.)

Despite the ambitious business plan, Bourne says he’s also making time to create three new works next year. First is a revival of AMP’s 1992 “Nutcracker,” which will open at a venue yet to be named for Christmas 2000. Next, Bourne plans to stage a small “Pinter-esque” piece that will be created by a core group of AMP dancers, including Adam Cooper, Will Kemp, Scott Ambler and Etta Murfitt.

Bourne said he wanted to “get back to basics” and work in an intimate setting with some of his more experienced dancers. But he admits that the project has already begun to take on a life of its own. It is scheduled to run for nine weeks at the Donmar Warehouse, a small but prestigious London venue, and New York’s Joyce Theater has expressed interest.

“Suddenly, it feels like, oh my God, this little thing I wanted to do for myself and the dancers has ended up being a lot bigger than I expected. We won’t have done a new piece for 2 1/2 years in London by the time it comes out, so there will be a lot of interest, a lot of press interest, and that is quite frightening. You actually realize that your position in the theatrical or dance world is such that you can’t really do a little thing and have it ignored.”

The third project returns to the “Swan Lake”-”Cinderella” theme--a remake of a classic. This time, it takes a special turn: Instead of transforming classic ballet into dance theater, Bourne has chosen to jump off from an opera, “Carmen.”

It’s a project that might be just the answer to Bourne’s critics, who have wondered aloud what he will do when he runs out of ballet classics to revamp. “If there were many more ballet scores around to choose from, we could keep going in that direction, but there aren’t,” he allows. “The story we are going to be telling is probably going to be mostly invented.”

The storytelling will be “raw, earthy and sexy,” inspired not just by the original but also by Pedro Almodovar films. It’s going to take the title literally, he says. It will be set among car mechanics--”Car men,” Bourne says, laughing. “Very, very obvious.”

Bourne says he is looking forward to working with a composer to make Bizet’s famous score work for a full-scale ballet. The existing score, he says, is “the sort of music we can get our teeth into.” The composition is “gonna be very percussive, a lot of natural sounds and people banging bottles and things on stage--using the environment to create the music.”

“I’m halfway there because a lot of it is familiar music; I’m not so worried about it as I would be if it was a complete new score,” he admits. “I think that this will be a move into a different direction for us. It’s quite exciting and creative in a way that I’m ready for.”

What he’s not quite ready for, he says, is Hollywood, although he admits he’s taken a lot of meetings in the last two years.

Bourne was worried that Hollywood would have a “crass reaction” to his work, but he says he found “a real genuine interest in [our] form of storytelling, which is quite cinematic--because a lot of great cinema tells a story without words for a great length of its running time. I could understand why people felt I would be interested in directing movies.”

Bourne is holding out for the right project. “I like what I’m doing at the moment, and I think there’s a few more of these shows in me yet.”

To get some movie experience in the meantime, Bourne is looking for funds to produce film versions of some of his previous dances, “rethinking them for the camera, finding my own language in a different medium.”

For now, Bourne says, he will continue to work alongside his own handpicked, home-grown company. “I’m trying to develop projects through [AMP], so I’m still surrounded by all my people that feed into what we do,” he says. “But there will come a point someday when I will have to stand on my own two feet.”

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“Cinderella,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave. Previews tonight through April 6, 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 2 and 8 p.m. Opens April 7. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, plus May 6, 13 and 20, 2 p.m. Ends May 23. $22.50-$65 ($25-$50 for previews). (213) 628-2772.