DANCE REVIEW:
DON QUIXOTE
10 MAR/11

JOHN COULBOURN,
QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5

If storylines were ever to become as precious as gasoline, it would almost definitely put the folks at the National Ballet of Canada squarely in the driver's seat.

Watching the opening night performance of their latest revisiting of DON QUIXOTE -- it opened a limited run Wednesday at the Four Seasons Centre -- one can't help but be impressed by the fact that somehow they manage to keep a ballet spinning a top for well over two hours on nothing but a teaspoon or two worth of storyline. And when it comes right down to it, even that has precious little to do with the titular hero of Miguel de Cervantes' seminal novel with which the work shares its name. Instead, most of this story's focus is on the romance between a lusty village barber and his equally lusty sweetheart, the daughter of the owner of the local tavern.

Simply stated, Basilio (Piotr Stanczyk) and Kitri (Greta Hodgkinson) are madly in love and want to get married, despite the fact that her parents want her to marry Gamache, a local nobleman (Kevin D. Bowles, handling it all with what can only be described as good grace). Love, of course, conquers all -- and that's pretty much the end of it, except for a dumb-show prologue, in which Don Quixote, Cervantes' hapless but beloved anti-hero, essayed here by Hazaros Surmeyan, links up with his voracious sidekick Sancho Panza (Robert Stephen) and the two then set off to put the world to rights. From there, their roles are reduced to that of mere bystanders as the romance that drives the ballet takes centre stage and never really surrenders it again.

For those who love Cervantes' tale -- or even the musical, MAN OF LA MANCHA, that it also spawned -- there's no shortage of people to blame for the aged Don's reduction in circumstances, starting with none other than Marius Petipa, the French-born master of the Russian ballet. It was Petipa, after all, who first to attempted to tell this story in dance, setting it to the oddly cartoonish music of Ludwig Minkus and thus providing the inspiration for a restaging (by Lindsay Fisher and Evelina Krasnova) that entered the NBOC repertoire back in 1983. And clearly, they were driven more by respect for Petipa's skill as a dancemaker than as a storyteller.

Still, as a ballet, DON QUIXOTE has endured for almost a century and a half, thanks to audiences who simply enjoy masterful dancing, particularly when it is served up with beautiful style and verve. Here, credit rests squarely at the feet of designer Desmond Heeley, who gives us a series of Spanish tableaux, beautifully balanced between the Gaudi and the gaudy, drenched in joyous colour and beautifully lit by Robert Thomson.

As for the verve, that's something rarely in short supply with this company. As the young lovers, Stanczyk and Hodgkinson are superb, turning Act III's classic pas de deux into a thrilling demonstration of good-hearted balletic one-upmanship. There's fine work too from Aleksandar Antonijevic as a self-possessed toreador and Xiao Nan Yu, as his mistress, and from Elena Lobsanova, as the Queen Dyad of Quixote's dreams, all backed by a disciplined chorus.

Even the NBOC Orchestra shines, doing its utmost under the baton of David Briskin to transform Minkus' score into a thing of memorable beauty -- and coming awfully close to succeeding. Ballet may never give us a memorable DON QUIXOTE -- but apparently an excuse for a memorable evening of dance doesn't come along every day.