Dance Review by Terry Teachout

SERVING UP A SIZZLING "CORSAIRE"

American Ballet Theatre’s new staging of Le Corsaire, which premiered Friday at the Metropolitan Opera House, is an absolute hoot. The plot is wonderfully absurd, the music is unpretentiously danceable, the scenery is a cheerful cross between early Disney World and late socialist realism, and the dancing is flat-out spectacular...

For balletomanes, this production, borrowed from the Boston Ballet, is a major event: ABT is only the second non-Russian company to perform one of the major full-evening story ballets of the 19th century.

Anna-Marie Holmes’ staging is an authentic reproduction of Konstantin Sergeyev’s version, which in turn was based on Marius Petipa’s restaging of the original 1867 ballet.

The Sergeyev-Petipa "Corsaire", long a mainstay of Soviet companies, was not seen outside Russia until 1988, though the pas de deux, which Rudolf Nureyev brought along with him when he defected to the West, has long been a staple of mixed bills the world over...

ABT is bristling with first-rate dancers, and the opening-night cast - Nina Ananiashvili, Giuseppe Picone, Angel Corella, Jose Manuel Carreno, Vladimir Malakhov and Ashley Tuttle - was a six-cylinder engine with enough horsepower to pull an express train uphill.