The Royal Ballet.

John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC June 20-25, 2006

The old days when Britain's Royal Ballet would tour extensively in the United States are as extinguished as the five-cent cigar. Two years ago it appeared for a handful of performances at Lincoln Center's great Ashton Festival, and this year it gave Kenneth MacMillan's Manon in Boston (to which wild courtesans could not have dragged me) and a mixed bill along with its new staging of The Sleeping Beauty, a ballet that has proved one of its truly iconic treasures, in Washington.

The mixed bill was more mixed in quality than it should have been. Ashton's La Valse, far from a major work, looked messily rehearsed and was most interesting for the manner in which former New York City Ballet principal Alexandra Ansanelli has apparently assimilated the Ashton style. But if La Valse looked messy, an Ashton masterpiece, Enigma Variations, fared worse. Like A Wedding Bouquet and Illuminations, all carefully woven of threaded choreographic vignettes, this moving threnody for Edwardian England looked shamefully shabby. Apart from Zenaida Yanowsky's exquisite Lady Elgar, Marianela Nunez as Isabel, and Sarah Lamb as Mary, here the work looked underrehearsed and totally unfocused.

MacMillan's Gloria, to the Poulenc score, is an oddly abstract account of grief, said to be inspired by the loss of youth in the trenches of World War I. (Who would know? Disgracefully, the Kennedy Center failed to provide program notes for any of the ballets, finding more value in endless lists of contributors to their building upkeep.) It has some good partnering work and was provided with an excellent cast led by Alina Cojocuru, Thiago Soares, and a surprisingly sluggish Carlos Acosta.

After its considerable praise from the London critics I was a shade disappointed by the handsomely performed--Leanne Benjamin was luminous--U.S. premiere of Alastair Marriott's well-crafted Tanglewood, a plotless ballet that seemed to find little spark from Ned Rorem's admittedly unsparky Violin Concerto.

The season's interest concentrated on The Sleeping Beauty, celebrating The Royal Ballet's 75th anniversary. Devised by its artistic director, Monica Mason, and Christopher Newton, it was based on the definitive 1946 production by company founder Ninette de Valois, which basically used the original 1890 Petipa choreography. (It was secured for her, with the help of Stepanov notation, by Nicholas Sergeyev, Petipa's assistant.) The legendary Oliver Messel scenery and costumes were here "realized" by Peter Farmer. This was the ballet that took the company to its new home at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, after World War II, and three years later opened its triumphant first American season in New York.

Now, about the new production, which in London has been somewhat controversial. I was at the celebrated 1946 first night, tucked away in the peanut gallery, and subsequently saw that staging (it lasted until 1968) more than 100 times. The 2006 choreography is pretty much accurate in steps if not always nuance, with certain necessary amendments, such as a couple of now traditional male solos and the coda to the pas de deux, and some unnecessary ones, such as replacing Ashton's Garland Dance with a confused new version by Christopher Wheeldon, cutting back the Hunting Scene, and retaining Anthony Dowell's feeble choreography for Carabosse and entourage. The disputed Farmer realization of the decor seems to me 65 percent Messel, with a far inferior 35 percent Farmer; the costumes, clearly the prime cause of London's critical dismay (not all that unsuitable despite their genteel, overly pastel fashion) are 95 percent Farmer.

Should the company have attempted to offer four different casts in Washington? Probably not. Only two, the gorgeously dazzling Cojocaru with a buoyant Johan Kobborg, and the sweetly assertive Nunez with an elegant Soares, were up to the ballet's highest standard, while the charming but slightly unmusical Roberta Marquez with a lightweight Federico Bonelli and the coltish Lamb with a dependable Viacheslav Samodurov were perhaps not yet ready for prime-time international display. Equally, only one of its three pairs of Bluebirds--Laura Morera and Brian Maloney, both admirable--was remotely up to the mark, and so it went on. The performances as a whole had a provincial German opera house tinge to them.

Yet, yet, yet. The company under Mason (although now no more British than the English National Ballet) is gradually climbing up, one day hopefully to its past glories. And apart from the meticulous Makharbek Vaziev 1999 reconstruction of Petipa for the Kirov--using those very same Stepanov notations, now residing at Harvard--this new/old staging is certainly the best around. See http://info.royaloperahouse.org/ballet.