American Ballet Theatre.

Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC May 14-July 7, 2007

It was a strange and mixed season--often with excellent dancing pursuing mediocre stagings. It accentuated an age-old problem with American Ballet Theatre. So frequently the performers seem almost on a different plane from what they are required to perform, with dancers exultant and choreographic mediocrity rampant. This whole eight-week season offered, outside of the current repertoire, only one, admittedly large-scale, new production, The Sleeping Beauty, and one major revival, Lar Lubovitch's full-evening Othello. There was also one major and very sad departure, that of the gorgeously tremulous Alessandra Ferri.

Over the years ABT has given three productions of the Petipa/Tchaikovsky classic The Sleeping Beauty, and this third was unfortunately, by a wide margin and on every count, the worst. Third time unlucky, you might say. Both of the two earlier productions--Mary Skeaping's in 1976 with a muzzy reproduction of Oliver Messel's 1946 designs for The Royal Ballet, and Kenneth MacMillan's in 1987, with oddly modernist designs by Nicholas Georgiadis--kept pretty much to the Marius Petipa text of the 1890 original, according to the stagings by Petipa's final regisseur, Nicolai Sergeyev, and the Stepanov notated score now in the Harvard collection.

This new production by Kevin McKenzie, the company's artistic director, the former ballerina Gelsey Kirkland and Michael Chernov, described as a dramaturge, virtually mangled Petipa's choreography. Everything was changed except for the dances for Aurora herself and the Bluebird pas de deux, and nothing was changed for the better. Even the ballet's scenario was ridiculously messed around with, apparently in some misguided attempt to hew closer to the original Perrault fairy tale.

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It wasn't even good to look at. The settings by Broadway designer Tony Walton proved grotesquely Disneyesque and Willa Kim's costumes simply tasteless. The whole production is everything that is insulting in that sadly abused word "provincial." And the first night performance was frankly disappointing. The Aurora was Veronika Part--who at a disastrous preview of excerpts given at the season's opening night gala, an occasion most notable for Lang Lang's flashy piano playing, had already muffed the Rose Adagio--and even the usually boisterously beautiful Marcelo Gomes seemed subdued as the Prince. In fact at the premiere only Herman Cornejo as the Bluebird--refusing to be deterred by a Princess Florine starting their duet stuck in a birdcage--performed any kind of magic.

Later casts were better. Both performances immediately following that depressing premiere--a dazzling Gillian Murphy partnered by a powerful Ethan Stiefel, and a radiant Paloma Herrera matched by the ardors of Angel Corella--suggested that since the choreography for Aurora is virtually intact, the production might still act as a shabby showcase for its ballerina. Similarly, as the various performances of Sarah Lane and Sascha Radetsky in the Bluebird pas de deux, and both Michele Wiles and Stella Abrera as the Lilac Fairy showed, some dancers are going to stand out even in this Sleeping Beauty like "a good deed in a naughty world."

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Talking of good deeds, for me the most interesting program was the double bill of Balanchine's music visualization Symphonie Concertante and Ashton's luminously Shakespearean The Dream. The company was at its best in both, yet brought a special Ashtonian breadth to the latter, with four exquisite Titanias: Xiomara Reyes, Murphy, Diana Vishneva (all three debuts), and Julie Kent, partnered nobly and respectively as Oberon by Stiefel, David Hallberg (also a debut), Gomes, and, in another debut, Corella. These four evenings--including such gems as Cornejo's phenomenal Puck--were for me the artistic highlights of the season.

Apart from this, the whole Met season, as has become the custom, was a parade of full-evening ballets, presumably in the marketing belief that these are needed to fill the theater. That said, the revival of Othello--with Lubovitch's commonplace choreography and Elliot Goldenthal's turgid score--still seemed inexplicable, but the company produced three interesting new casts in the title role: Gomes, Hallberg, and a fascinating guest artist, Rasta Thomas, who was the most imaginatively expressive of the three, and should perhaps be encouraged to return.

ABT still--and rightly--looks warmly on (and generally shines in) the 19th-century Russian classics, and the week of Natalia Makarova's poetic staging of La Bayadere at the beginning of the season and the week of McKenzie's sturdy version of Swan Lake toward the end, provided many pleasures. There is only space here to mention Bayadere with Herrera and Corella, and Vishneva with Stiefel, and it was also Corella who partnered a magisterial Nina Ananiashvili in Swan Lake, while another highlight of that Swan Lake week was a stylishly spectacular showing from Wiles and Hallberg.

This Swan Lake, followed by a repeat of last season's tedious staging of Cinderella by James Kudelka--Kent made a charming heroine and Gomes was a bravura Prince, but why not give them and the company the standard Ashton version?--ended the season, but before that we had two weeks of MacMillan. I personally am not much of an admirer of either of his beautifully decorated (brilliant Georgiadis designs) extravaganzas, Marion and his version of Romeo and Juliet, both created for The Royal Ballet. But this time two of the performances had a special if sad luster. They marked the farewell of one of ABT's greatest dramatic ballerinas, that Duse of the dance, Alessandra Ferri.

Ferri joined ABT in 1985 as a principal at the invitation of Mikhail Baryshnikov, after five years with The Royal Ballet, when she caught the attention of MacMillan, who became a mentor. It was therefore absolutely appropriate that she took her farewell in two of her favorite roles: Manon and Juliet. It was also fitting that in both she was partnered by the stalwart Roberto Bolle, making his debut as an ABT guest, who comes from La Scala, Milan, the school where Ferri first trained and the city of her birth.

Both performances were extraordinary, with that last Juliet having the special quality of a parting that was sweet sorrow. Ferri always danced inside the skin of a role and that skin trembled with the heartbeat of an inner passion. She was unique, she was Ferri, and she will be missed in our dancing lives and honored in our dancing memories.

Reviewed By Clive Barnes