SARASOTA BALLET.

SARASOTA BALLET

JANUARY 15-17, 1999 VAN WEZEL PERFORMING ARTS HALL SARASOTA, FLORIDA 

Audiences everywhere are demanding full-evening ballets. But full-evening ballets are almost as rare as a hen's tooth in a cockfight. Unlike our sister art, opera, ballet has no limitless reserve of classics. So what can be done? The answer sounds as simple as the question--find a suitable theme, preferably one with name recognition, and then either commission a new score or pick existing music to match. After that, all you have to do is get the choreography and the production, which could prove the easier part of the equation.

Sarasota Ballet is one of Florida's two major ballet companies--the other being Edward Villella's Miami City Ballet; and it is directed by Robert de Warren, an alumnus of Britain's Royal Ballet and for many years in charge of ballet at La Scala in Milan. Aware that he is under constant pressure to provide new material, de Warren has recently come up with a ballet version of Madame Butterfly.

An astute choice, for the story is almost as familiar as Romeo and Juliet, while de Warren is an experienced choreographer with large-scale opera-house experience. So far so good. His next choices proved less secure. Unconvincingly, he relocated the Belasco/Puccini story to Hawaii immediately before Pearl Harbor. (The Vietnam War update devised by the Broadway musical Miss Saigon proved smarter.)

But the story is only half the battle--then there is the music. De Warren chose an eclectic sushi platter: Copland and big band swing for openers, then a mix of Ravel orientalism with Japanese-style music commissioned from David Goldstein, and, finally, recorded excerpts from the Puccini opera itself. The results sounded clumsy, prompting stage images that often looked too much like music videos.

Although the costumes by Bill Fenner proved quite attractive, the modest settings had that synthetic japonaiserie air of a Japanese restaurant, acceptable yet unremarkable. And it is fiendishly difficult to convey Japan in classic dance. Balanchine succeeded in Bugaku, as did Ashton in Madame Chrysantheme, but who else? De Warren managed to sustain a Japanese feel to the dancing, while a couple of his grasp-and-grope pas de deux (until emotionally drowned by the singing) revealed dramatic power.

This is a well-schooled, attractive company. I caught two casts, the first night led by Nicole Martin and Dmitri Mikheyenko and the second cast with Stephanie Murrish and Daniil Gaifullin. Both Butterflies danced stylishly and fluttered with the requisite emotion, although their stalwart Russian partners were of dourer, sterner stuff.

The audiences, seemingly lepidopterists all, obviously loved it, so de Warren hit a Sarasota home run. But it is not a work likely to add itself to our precious, small bundle of standard full-evening classics.