ABT, DON QUIXOTE, MET OPERA HOUSE, NEW YORK, APRIL 1999 |
| From: NEW YORK POST, April 30, 1999 Dance Review by Clive Barnes ABT HAS FUN WITH DON QUIXOTEONLY people expecting a serious dramatization of Cervantes’ old novel Don Quixote need be disappointed with American Ballet Theater’s staging of the venerable Russian ballet of the same name at the Metropolitan Opera House. Even that Broadway musical "Man of La Mancha" was far truer to the original - although the Knight of the Woeful Countenance and... Sancho Panza, do indeed drift through the ballet, and at one point there are even windmills. Yet this is nit-picking, for this 19th-century ballet with painlessly umpty-tumpty music by Leon Minkus, is just a literary excuse for the dancers and their audience to have an unaffected and unliterary good time. The classiest performance so far came on Wednesday night when Nina Ananiashvili and Julio Bocca brought all their experience and sheer artistry to the roles of the village girl Kitri and her impoverished lover, Basil. ...But this Don Quixote is far from being a display piece for just two dancers - and it shows off the entire company, including the character dancers, such as the witty Guillaume Graffin, the young rambunctious Marcelo Gomes and the womanly and glamorous Carmen Corella, and even the mimes, with Victor Barbee and Gil Boggs making the utmost of those surprisingly minor characters — yes, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
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