Onegin at Ballet West

A couple of million years ago (e.g. right before the pandemic), I went to see Ballet West's first production of John Cranko's Onegin, which is a three-act narrative ballet based on the verse novel (Yvgeny Onegin) by Alexander Pushkin. The novel was also the basis for Tchaikovsky's opera of the same title, and the score for the ballet is also the music of Tchaikovsky, but not the same music, which is a little confusing. Tchaikovsky did not write two separate Onegins, however -- it's just that Cranko chose a variety of pieces by the composer to set his ballet to, instead of commissioning a ballet suite based on the opera. 

Anyway, it so happens that Onegin was the first opera I saw as an adult. I was backpacking through Europe after my junior year of college, and in Vienna I went to get standing room tickets to whatever opera was on that night at the famous Wiener Staatsoper. It just happened to be 3+ hours in Russian with no supertitles, but whatever! I don't remember that much about it except that I cried when (spoiler alert) Onegin shot Lensky and then howled "Nyet" many many times (howled operatically, of course).

If you want a brief plot summary, watch this fun promotional video from Ballet West.

So, this weekend, I went back to see Onegin again, and I carried with me very fond memories of my first experience, which was with my eldest child who remarked that Rex Tilton as Onegin was "as iconic as Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy, in much the same way, but more Gothick." I feared that nobody could come close to that iconicity. There was something just so... insidious about his portrayal of masculine self-regard and self-serving drama.

Trepidations aside, the performance I saw on Saturday was just brilliant, simply put. Lensky was one of my favorite rising stars, Vinicius Lima (aka Vini), and while he seemed quite joyous for a poet (not particularly romantically brooding), there was something refreshing in his youthful high spirits so that when he drops dead of a bullet wound, I actually felt sort of stabbed, myself. Olga, danced by Chelsea Kiefer, was right on key -- a little frivolous, a little wild, and very, very sorry for flirting with Onegin even though she was obviously attracted to him.

Jenna Rae Herrera, from
the Ballet West website with the
caption: "Balanchine’s Tarantella 
© The George Balanchine Trust"

Tatiana for this performance was Jenna Herrera, whom I absolutely adore as a dancer, a teacher, and a person. She is the closest thing to a ray of light that a human being can be, and her stage energy is fizzy like champagne, so I wondered if she could pull off the bookish, shy, vulnerable, and romantic girl of Act I and II, and the emotionally mature and complex woman of Act III, since the two are as different from one another as they are from how I normally perceive Jenna as a dancer. But fear not! There were very good reasons for Jenna's promotion to Principal Artist at the end of last season; she has enormous technical ability, but her acting also has incredible range, and she was utterly convincing as the young Tatiana, but devastating as the mature Tatiana. The audience literally burst into applause when she finally (spoiler alert) rejected Onegin -- one woman sitting near me cried out, "You tell him, sister!" It's a dramatic moment, choreographically (see the video linked above), but something about the way this tiny, fierce woman did it just connected for people. One of the corps dancers who I talked to the next day told me that the whole cast was weeping in the wings.

I was skeptical about the dancer cast as Onegin -- partly, I had hoped to see one of my favorites, Adrian Fry, in the role, but my season tickets are for Saturdays and he was in the Friday cast. No matter, but it definitely made me more inclined to be critical when it came to Brian Waldrep, who is new to the company. I had never seen him perform before, and so had no sense of what to expect. Furthermore, I had that "iconic Mr. Darcy" thing in the back of my mind.

Well.

When he first came on, all snooty nose in the air and affected boredom, I felt like maybe he was underplaying the character a little, and that it would be hard to imagine a dreamy young girl falling for him; she's so wrapped up in her own fantasy life, after all. Yet, as soon as he started interacting with Jenna's Tatiana, I changed my mind. He chose a very restrained demeanor for Onegin, but it almost made the character seem more sinister and colder, which worked, because it underscored how much of Tatiana's sudden passion for him came from her own imagination. He was great in the acting scenes, and in the scene where she fantasizes dancing a very romantic pas de deux with him in her bedroom, he had just the right sonambulisitic (is that a word? sleep-walker like?) air to keep the sense of the whole thing being in her head; later, when the mature Onegin dances ("for real") with the mature Tatiana, the contrast was really notable -- this was the actual man, a bit violent, domineering, and intemperate in his passion, rather than tender. He also handled the demanding and somewhat repetitive choreographic elements with a great deal of precision, the hallmark of good technique being that you don't even notice that the dancer is working for difficult enchaînements because instead you're seeing them as expressive of a thought, a mood, or an idea. He pulled that off expertly.

Iconic Mr. D

So, it was basically a big, dark, beautiful thing, a story ballet for grownups led by two principals who are both at the top of their game both dramatically and technically; they are ballet dancers for grownups. And honestly, even though the score is a pastiche, it doesn't sound that way. During one of the intermissions I overheard a woman saying to her companion, "It's like Jane Austen, only Russian, and sexy." That reminded me of the Colin-Firth-as-Mr.-Darcy thing, and also (as a habitual reader of the oeuvre of Jane Austen on a pretty regular cycle every couple of years), it made me think of the darker things that lurk beneath the polite surfaces of many of Austen's novels. Violence, betrayal, and ruin: my particular favorite novel is Persuasion, in which the heroine herself is guilty of rejecting the love of a man she herself loves, but a man whose entire livelihood is killing (he's a naval officer in wartime), and who is almost trapped into a loveless marriage by another woman over a matter of honor. Anyway, no duels (onstage) in Jane Austen, but we know that they do happen. And they did happen, IRL, too, as the ghost of Pushkin, who died as the result of one such duel (with his wife's lover, who was also her brother-in-law) at the age of 37, could tell us. Like Austen, Pushkin is often credited as being the progenitor of a whole genre of socially realistic novels in his native tongue. 

So when do we get the ballet of Persuasion? (It would be soooooo much better than the recent, dreadful film version with Dakota Johnson, which I couldn't even watch. And it would have to have music by an English composer, maybe Holst?)

After all, there's lots of dancing in Austen. And actually,
if you google "Jane Austen Ballet" you will find that
American Repertory Ballet in Princeton, NJ, has a
"Pride and Prejudice" in their repertoire. Interesting...