Dance Review by Anna Kisselgoff

Kevin McKenzie’s new staging of Swan Lake for American Ballet Theater is the blockbuster production of the dance season, and all its new and traditional components fell into place on Saturday night. Nina Ananiashvili and Julio Bocca galvanized the company with their hair-raisingly brilliant and deep performance, whipping the audience at the Metropolitan Opera House into a frenzied ovation.

...Mr. McKenzie has a few surprises and changes, but his springboard is the standard 1895 version of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. Like the 1967 Swan Lake staged by David Blair that was a longtime staple at Ballet Theater, this version has no dark psychological twist and tells a story straight. Odette, turned into a swan by the evil magician von Rothbart, is betrayed by Prince Siegfried; he can turn her back into a maiden with true love but is seduced instead by Odile, Rothbart’s daughter.

No one, however, goes to Swan Lake for just the story. The sheer opera-house spectacle of this version is already a hit with the audience. Zack Brown’s sets and costumes, heavy on shades of blue or gold, evoke a rich Renaissance court at a lakeside castle, very Swiss or German, depending on your travels...

It took Ms. Ananiashvili’s dancing, stunning in its physical power and projecting emotion through sheer technique, to give the full measure of this production. It took Mr. Bocca, who found some of the choreography in Mr. McKenzie’s new solos for the prince as illogical as did his colleagues, to make sense of the role. He pulled it dramatically together...

Odette is first seen in the new prologue as a maiden. Rothbart, in a cape with slimy green leaves and a padded leotard that makes him look muscular and grotesque, steps back and another dancer portrays him in noble guise. Bowing and gallant, he grabs Odette in a tight embrace...

Maxim Belotserkovsky and Ms. Ananiashvili offered a desperate struggle full of flying lifts. Suddenly the horned Rothbart steps forward with a realistic flapping swan in his arms...

The radical shortening of Act IV makes short shrift of the storm scene, performed during a set change and a short farewell duet leads quickly into the ensemble. Rothbart is defeated by the double suicide of Odette and Siegfried from a rocky cliff with ruins. The one jarring note is the Disneyesque sun within which Odette and Siegfried find love in death.

There is only one intermission, which moves things along, although Mr. McKenzie has added new dances. He has also restored some of Tschaikovsky’s 1887 score for the first Moscow production, using music from a now discarded pas de six...

The new choreography tends toward the conventional, with the exception of Rothbart’s solo in the ballroom. The trio that dances the traditional pas de trois in Act I has a brief adagio in the ballroom to start the entertainment. The fiancees waltz goes to four women and their escorts because each introduced a troupe of character dances. These are spiffy and smartly danced: only the Spanish dance, in yellow costumes, looks a bit fussy.