‘Frankenstein’ visually compelling, but not without flaws
Choreographer breaks ground on new genre: elegant monster ballet
SAN FRANCISCO — The dance-going public is drawn to full-length story ballets the way film buffs flock to old movies. Never mind if the story is cheesy, or if the corps de ballet is used mostly to pack the stage like extras in a Cecil B. DeMille production. As in old films, these ballets — from “Swan Lake” to “Cinderella”— are legible to almost everyone, and they deliver the emotional punch audiences yearn for. They also fill opera house seats.
With that in mind, San Francisco Ballet joined forces with the Royal Ballet in London to back a production of “Frankenstein” by young British choreographer Liam Scarlett. Learning that Scarlett planned to base the work on Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel — “Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus,” a tale set in the 1700s at the dawn of modern science — San Francisco Ballet artistic director Helgi Tomasson was intrigued. It met his hunger to “find something new, ... different and maybe daring.”
Friday night at the War Memorial Opera House this collaborative “Frankenstein” hit the stage in the company’s third program of the season before a packed house.
The questions: Is it new? Different? Daring? The answer: sometimes.
The first image of the production is arresting. On the drop curtain there’s a giant skull viewed from the side, a spinal cord and what appears to be a trachea at a disturbing remove from the spine. When that curtain rises, a three-act, nearly three-hour, visually compelling but choreographically flawed ballet starts unfolding.
It offers luscious performances, relentless drama and spectacular set design (John Macfarlane) and lighting (David Finn). Replete with delicious steampunk pyrotechnics, the design alone creates enough imaginative spectacle to become a leading character in its own right. A tempestuous, mostly traditional score by Lowell Liebermann takes viewers on a vertiginous ride, while Scarlett breaks ground on a new genre: the elegant monster ballet.
Elegance is now a cornerstone of San Francisco Ballet principals and soloists, and its polish isn’t just physical, but emotional and psychological. Frances Chung and Joseph Walsh — two deeply nuanced, beautifully paired dancers — took the opening-night leads as lovers Elizabeth Lavenza and scientist Victor Frankenstein. Individually and together, they bring depth to steps that are essentially a steady stream of repeat pirouettes along with wide circlings of the legs and sharp leaps in arabesque that, as language, say little more than, “We’re swept up.“But the couple’s expressive clarity, the physical and emotional restraint and breadth possessed by each transformed choreographic banality into dances of love and longing.
Sasha De Sola — playing the sweet, slightly envious Justine Moritz, daughter of the household’s housekeeper — made her phrases telegraph a luscious sort of kindness. In fact, the whole central cast was spot on, with special kudos to young Max Berenshteyn. By contrast, the corps’ ensemble assignments got to the heart of Scarlett’s problem: His dance language is monosyllabic, leading the dancing of the corps to look perfunctory, as though he had said, “OK, now some crowd action.”
And what of longing and love?
For those brought up on the pop versions of the tale, or who read Shelley’s novel many years ago, it’s worth remembering that Victor Frankenstein is repulsed by the creature he creates. With some misplaced humor, Walsh pulls out a leg from the medical theater’s stock and sticks it on the cadaver, then an arm. Finally a lightening strike into the scarridden flesh brings it back to life. And the young doctor is magnetically haunted, even maddened, by his creation.
In Scarlett’s hands the monster — danced with sensual, lonely fury by Vitor Luiz — seems to narrow into a hidden, homoerotic aspect of Frankenstein’s self. And loneliness sends it on a rampage of revenge. Scarlett is adept at lacing the production with echoes throughout.