Her Des Grieux (and her Siegfried here in 2001), Carlos Acosta, was earnest and naive to a fault; it wasn’t hard to see why Manon was attracted to him (Rojo seemed especially taken with his book) and also why she’d find G.M. more of a man. The role, which MacMillan created for Anthony Dowell, is all slow, controlled turns and developpés into attitude and arabesque rather than high-flying pyrotechnics; Acosta’s poetry can look posed. José Martín, who was a soloist with Boston Ballet before joining the Royal in 2002, gave Lescaut speed and precision and more humor than cynicism. He elevated the role, and so did Sarah Lamb, who was a principal with Boston Ballet before joining the Royal in 2004, as his mistress, smiling, teasing, enjoying herself and showing it in the brio with which she supported Martín in their second-act comic duet. She’d have looked even better without the wig.
JOSÉ MARTÍN: Speed, precision, and humor for Lescaut. |
Friday night brought Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg, steady partners since their Romeo and Juliet in 2001. She began as a skittish Juliet, he as a bit of a stuffed shirt, self-conscious and almost smirky in his opening display. He had more flow than Acosta, however, and in their whiplash lifts he and Cojocaru, the smallest of the three pairs, left vapor trails. She’s a delectable dancer, but her energy isn’t as centered as Rojo’s, her limbs going in every direction, and so she doesn’t give off the same sexuality. At Madame’s, she was so reserved she looked almost frozen, or perhaps it’s that her delicate features doesn’t register from any distance. Viacheslav Samodurov was a bigger and harder Lescaut, and also the most palpably and hilariously drunk at Madame’s, where his duet with Laura Morera, all missed moves, was punctuated by bursts of audience laughter. Morera’s mistress was archer and more brittle than Lamb’s, more like current company director Monica Mason’s in the 1982 Royal DVD and probably closer to MacMillan’s concept.Saturday afternoon, Zenaida Yanowsky (sister of Boston Ballet principal Yury Yanowsky) and Danish guest artist Kenneth Greve were a big couple with big detail, especially in their acting. Greve’s Des Grieux was a more mature and assured student, with the power to protect Manon if not pamper her and the chops to give size to MacMillan’s choreography without distorting it; even in Des Grieux’s signature move, turning into a back arabesque so that he seems to be backing away from confrontation, Greve looked prepossessing, and he was the poster boy for plush, soundless landings. Yanowsky shot right out of the box, taking in the entire courtyard and reacting most visibly to the ratcatcher, sensing that in the end she’d be the rat. Of the three Manons, she was the most sexual (Rojo being the most sensual), the most taken with the cut and style of the robe G.M. gives her, the least taken with G.M. himself (as soon as Des Grieux confronts her at Madame’s, she regrets her decision), and the most transformed and haunted in Louisiana, where at the end she again started at seeing the ratcatcher in her delirium. Thiago Soares’s Lescaut and Marianela Nuñez’s mistress were unexceptional, but it didn’t matter: Yanowsky and Greve had already unstacked MacMillan’s deck.
Related:
At long last love?, Bird brain, More than child’s play, More 
- At long last love?
Boston Ballet has been playing the Romeo and Juliet dating game for almost 25 years now.
- Bird brain
The plays of Anton Chekhov don’t take well to dance.
- More than child’s play
After a slow start, The Nutcracker went on to become the most-watched ballet of the 20th century.
- Building blocks
New ballets must be one of the world’s most expensive consumable products.
- L’Allegro, fuss and feathers, and the ICA blues
This year we were looking forward to dance performances at the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater in the new ICA.
- Where the chips fell
Dance history reverberated across Boston during the past few weeks, affirming that how we live now owes a lot to how we’ve chosen to remember — and forget.
- The look of love
Following the acclaim given to Boston-based choreographer Gianni Di Marco’s short ballet Schéhérazade in 2005, Festival Ballet’s artistic director Mihailo Djuric commissioned Di Marco to create another new ballet for the company.
- Wising up
Sergei Prokofiev’s two classical ballets invariably find Boston Ballet playing the dating game.
- Up and down
Dance is all about direction.
- No place like home
The first thing audiences see when the curtain goes up on Boston Ballet's Giselle is our heroine's charming Rhineland-village home, a rustic abode that in Peter Farmer's set is framed by birches, a symbol of fidelity.
- Happy feet
The architectural team of Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater at the new Institute for Contemporary Art as a 325-seat jewel box, its transparent walls allowing the Boston harbor and skyline to serve as a scenic backdrop or turn opaque as the performance requires.
- Less
Topics:
Dance
, Entertainment, Giuseppe Verdi, Carlos Acosta, More
, Entertainment, Giuseppe Verdi, Carlos Acosta, Alina Cojocaru, Barry Lyndon, Johan Kobborg, Giacomo Puccini, Jules Massenet, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Dance, Less
