SLAVES, PASHAS AND PIRATES: CLASSICAL ESCAPISM

For escapist entertainment and some of the best male dancing in ballet, there is nothing like American Ballet Theater’s spectacular staging of «Le Corsaire», a 19th-century adventure yarn about life on the bounding main.

The year-old production returned to the Metropolitan Opera House on Tuesday night with Julio Bocca making his debut as Conrad, the swashbuckling pirate chief who rescues Medora, the heroine, from a slave dealer and then winds up shipwrecked with her on a rock.

The plot may sound silly, but the high level of classical dancing is not. And although the Ballet Theater version is first and foremost a showcase for male bravura, this performance was also a triumph for Nina Ananiashvili, dazzling in the ballerina role, and for Ashley Tuttle, as Gulnare, Medora’s fellow captive in a Turkish bazaar of the imagination.

To regard «Le Corsaire» as a war horse of the ballet repertory is not exactly accurate in an American context. It is really a new war horse. Generations of balletgoers saw the «Corsaire» pas de deux that Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn made famous as an excerpt. But it was only when the Kirov Ballet went to Paris in 1987 with its version of Marius Petipa's 19th-century Russian production that audiences in the West first saw a full-length staging of «Le Corsaire». Not only was the celebrated pas de deux seen in context, but it was also revealed to be part of a pas de trois in which Medora is partnered not only by Ali, a slave in harem pants, but also by his master, Conrad.

The original inspiration was Byron’s poem of 1814, "The Corsair". It is a passionate and brutal tale, in which the poet extols a highborn black-hearted hero and his free and adventurous life. The core of the inspiration lies buried in Ballet Theater’s version, which is a revised staging of the first American production at the Boston Ballet in 1997. Anna-Marie Holmes, the Boston Ballet's artistic director, transferred that version with some changes to Ballet Theater last year.

It should be noted that the staging differs from the Kirov’s last production, which placed the shipwreck at the start, rather than at the end where it belongs. Ms. Holmes turned instead to a 1992 Bolshoi Ballet production by Konstantin Sergeyev. Add the accretions of changes since the French original in 1856 and Petipa’s last version in 1899, and one can ask what is left. The answer is a hodgepodge of music from five composers, but also vestiges of Petipa’s classical choreography, notably a ravishing trio for three odalisques in blue tutus, and a vision scene, «Jardin Anime». Soviet choreographers added additional flash and bravura; it was not wrong to juggle numbers around here to cram more dancing into Act I...

Ms. Ananiashvili, as Medora projected a grander vision. Teasing the local Pasha (Ethan Brown, in an astute and comic portrayal), she was delightful and sweet. Love with Mr. Bocca was expressed tenderly in the pas de trois of Act II and a Soviet-style bedroom duet. She is a wonderful actress and can also modulate her wonderful dancing. Allegro is her strong suit. Her leaps are exuberant and vibrant, her phrasing dramatic and her turns forceful and fast. Above all she captures the essence of Medora, a free spirit.