Although I'd heard that the Bolshoi season at the Met was turning into a huge popular success, its magnitude didn't become clear until I decided to get standing-room tickets for the two final performances of 'The Pharoah's Daughter' on Saturday. Regular seats were already sold out, and when I arrived at the Met around eight in the morning (tickets go on sale at ten), I found out I was number 51 on the sign-up sheet! I can't remember standing-room for the ballet having so many people so early since the superstar-laden days of the Seventies (when the lines would sometimes start the evening before to see Baryshnikov, Nureyev, Kirkland and the like). By the time the box office opened, there were literally hundreds of people waiting and the line snaked completely around the side of the Met to the Performing Arts library. Amazing.

I rushed out of my apartment so hurriedly that morning I forgot to check the casting on the Met's website. I asked the woman on line next to me if she happened to know who was dancing which performance, to which she replied, reassuringly, "It doesn't matter. They're all wonderful." Ah, if only it were so! Actually, I left the matinee disappointed and uncertain whether to bother returning that evening (I'd bought tickets to both performances). Perhaps succumbing to a surfeit of Pugni, or out of a desire of seeing Tsiskaridze again after five years, I took the plunge, and was glad I did, as the Bolshoi must've been saving their better dancers for their closing performance.

I find the whole idea of "reconstructing" defunct ballets to be very problematic, although not without sometimes surprising rewards, as with the Kirov's old/new 'Sleeping Beauty,' with its esoteric pageantry and Aurora's friends looking very much like Florodora girls. From what I'd read of 'The Pharoah's Daughter,' (née 'La Fille du Pharaon' in 1862) and what I've seen of Pierre LaCotte's choreography over the years, I wasn't expecting much more than dancing as a vehicle for presenting LaCotte's own beautiful and elaborate sets and costumes (as a choreographer he's a great set designer); after the matinee it seemed that 'Daughter' had pretty much lived up, or rather down, to my expectations. It's not hard to see why this ballet fell out of production. Cesar Pugni's music is pretty awful, and made me long for Minkus or Adam. Although you can, as they say, dance to it, the score never rises above the serviceable, with banal melodies, and such insistent, demented perkiness that you can feel your brain cells exploding to escape the cheerful onslaught. (I can't remember a single melody which is just as well for if I did it would surely be one of those mindless jingles that are impossible to get out of one's head, and I'd be fingering a razor blade now instead of my keyboard.) And the plot is equally banal, yet another refraction of the Romantic cliché of "boy-meets-exotic-girl-and-loses-her."

This time the boy is a foppish English dilettante/explorer, Lord Wilson, who, via the familiar device of an opium-inspired dream, finds himself transformed into an ancient Egyptian named Ta-Hor, and hurled into an improbable love with the Pharoah's daughter, Aspicia, in whose very tomb he'd just fallen asleep. A proper aristocrat, Wilson also dreams his servant, John Bull (clever name, that) back in time, where he's saddled with a skimpier loincloth than Wilson, and the name of Passiphonte. The characters are all cardboard cutouts, and, although Aspicia spends much of the ballet begging with her father not to kill Ta-Hor, there's little sense of why the two love each other or how love has transformed them, let alone any of the great themes which inform the 19th-century "biggies" which have deservedly survived the test of time. The plot of 'The Pharoah's Daughter' is little more than a peg upon which to hang elaborate ensemble dancing, divertissements, some (very) old-school French style bravura, and spectacular spectacle.

'The Pharoah's Daughter' has often been compared with 'Aida,' yet another comparison popped unbidden into my head. Say what you will about the quality and historical accuracy of his choreographic style (and I'll have something to say about it quite shortly), LaCotte seems to have acquired, either deliberately or fortuitously, a marked understanding of the importance of pure unalloyed kitsch in Russian balletic taste. I've found myself adoring some of the juicier over-the-top moments in Russian productions of the classics we don't see in American ones, like Minou dancing with that urn on her head in 'La Bayadere,' that ballet's astonishing horde of tom-tom pounding Indians, or the rubber-backed tavern dancers in 'Don Quixote.' 'The Pharoah's Daughter' has its share of such moments. We have a dancing monkey who enters swinging from a vine, a very animated prop of a temple-dwelling poisonous snake who dispatches an unfortunate slave in the third act and the unfortunate use of blackface for said slave (when he first pops onstage, I thought, "My God, it's Al Jolson!") and the four very, very cute children who attend upon Ramzé, Aspicia's own servant. Then there's the mammoth cymbal-clanging dance during the wedding celebration in the third act, in which the corps engages in stately games of patty-cake with each other so as to bang merrily the small cymbals on their hands, all the while making elegant floor patterns. Then there are the two girls in the last act who walk about while carefully display their costume's Horus-like wings, looking for all the world like Las Vegas showgirls. As with the Kirov's recreated 'Sleeping Beauty,' 'The Pharoah's Daughter' reminds us that even in the glory days of the Imperial Ballet, the line between High Art and Show Business was porous indeed (perhaps one reason that late product of the Imperial school, Balanchine, was so easily able to move between ballet, music halls and Broadway). Indeed, this ballet reminded me how strongly the appeal of the strange and exotic permeates both high and popular art, and I found myself spending the occasional slow moment trying to decide which of the pair of Wilson and Bull was Bing Crosby, and which Bob Hope, to Aspicia's Dorothy Lamour.

So, bereft of great music or a compelling story, 'The Pharoah's Daughter' really needs great choreography, brilliant dancing and spectacular design to succeed, and here the Bolshoi production came through only sporadically. Pierre LaCotte's coy, sort-of-old-fashioned choreography often looks more fussily archaic than genuinely of the old French school whence sprang both Marius Petipa's Imperial Russian style and the preserved-in-amber Danish style of Bournonville and Beck. But, while the handed-down Danish works look somehow right, with their elaborate puzzle-box batterie subsumed into an organic whole in which the choreographic shape bounces, burbles and flows convincingly (and delightfully), LaCotte's work, especially evident in many male solos in 'The Pharoah's Daughter,' seems cobbled together with what often looks to my eye to be hard bits perversely mashed together with other even harder bits: tricky footwork, odd preparations, and a marked lack of connecting steps during which a dancer might catch his breath (does LaCotte's car have a "Glissades are for Wimps" bumpersticker?). This prodigal footwork is all-too-often combined with a stultifying emphasis on symmetrical phrasing and a tightly-held vertical torso, with little of Bournonville and Beck's delightful and surprising asymmetries (or their épaulement, for that matter).

Here's an example: there's a moment in the first act where Ta-Hor, having fallen in love with Aspicia, bounds sideways like an over-caffeinated crab, repeating a combination of entrechats and big échappés battus, all the while keeping his arms low and as motionless as his torso (or trying to). In the matinee, Vladimir Neporozhny, who looked to be having a really bad afternoon (he had a slight fall in one of his first-act solos and seemed content to merely survive afterwards), strained and struggled through this combination, and it looked academic, painful and pointless. Many of the other male solos by Neporozhny and others in that performance were also strained and sloppy, and I wondered why on earth the Bolshoi, with a style that stresses nailing the Big Moves while finessing the small stuff, would want to torture itself by undertaking this mannered, reconstituted old style for which it clearly isn't suited. I found myself longing for a girl to uncork a manége of pique turns around the stage, or a man to circle it with jeté coupés and double sautes de basque.

(I stopped wondering and longing when I returned for the evening's performance, for which the Bolshoi had clearly reserved its best dancers. Bits which had been muddy now sparkled, and, while many solos still looked fussy, at least made more sense, choreographically. Nikolai Tsisikaridze, very much the big, booming mover I remembered from the Bolshoi's last visit here in 2000, had power and polish enough, to either vanquish LaCotte's preciosity, or, perhaps more to the point, invest it with some kinetic and dramatic meaning. Tsiskaridze bounded through that entrechat/échappé combination with ease, and suddenly I realized he was quite literally jumping for joy, his flickering feet mimicking the excited beating of his heart.)

One of the few bits of Petipa restored from notation is a very hard solo in the second-act divertissement welcoming the King of Nubia to the Pharaoh's court. With its beats, and closely held movement which never cuts loose, it almost looks like a Petipa woman's solo, writ larger and higher, with batterie serving much like airborne pointe work. I won't pretend I knew it at a glance for Petipa, as it looks unlike any other male choreography attributed to him I've ever seen, although 'The Pharoah's Daughter' was made relatively early in his career, before his style loosened up for the big Russian stages. For I know not what reason, LaCotte appended a double tour to the knee at the solo's finish (there are a lot of suspicious jumps and turns to the knee throughout the ballet), a jarring bit of Don Quixote-ish bravura. (Andrey Bolotin seemed to have a better time with this solo in the evening than the matinee.)

Which brings me to another of LaCotte's oddities: he's very inconsistent, often bringing in choreographic elements which clearly would never have happened back in Petipa's day, including an old-school Bolshoi-style straight-arm hand-on-her-butt lift in the third act's wedding scene, and much of Aspicia's dance with the King of the Nile and her underwater cavaliers, with many tricky lifts as she's passed from partner to partner, is not even remotely of a period style. I'd complain more, except that this adagio is the loveliest dance in the entire ballet, and LaCotte is often at his most interesting when he's at his least didactic. I wonder what 'The Pharoah's Daughter' would have been like had LaCotte chosen a looser approach to history, as Ashton did with 'Sylvia,' or if it might've been more interesting to try to envision what the ballet might look like today had it been performed throughout the Soviet years, like 'Don Quixote' or 'Swan Lake.'

Anyway, on to the dancers. As mentioned, in the matinee Vladimir Neporozhny was a disappointment as Lord Wilson/Ta-Hor. Tall and with the spindly legs of most Bolshoi men these days (the skimpy faux-Egyptian costumes leave little doubt, and what's happened to the beefy-thighed Bolshoi men of yesteryear?), Neporozhny seemed overmatched by LaCotte's fussy intricacies. Perhaps because his steps seemed to weigh so heavily on his mind (not to mention his ankles), he had little rapport with the lovely Svetlana Lunkina, who seeemed a bit out of her element here. A pretty and delicate ballerina, Lunkina was a flower in a demanding role that calls, no, screams for a hard-edged diamond. In the bravura passages of the hunt and betrothal divertissements, Lunkina backed off both emotionally and technically, and was most comfortable with the somewhat dreamier imagery of the underwater grotto scene, although, with its multi-partnered adagio and long, long solo, it was far from a walk in the park.

It was with Svetlana Zakharova's Aspicia that the role and the ballerina met. I shall always have mixed feelings about the ultra-super-hyper-extended Zakharova, that French curve in toeshoes. I've found her fondness for sky-high extensions, whether appropriate or not, to be a bit predictable and vulgar, and her extreme thinness and almost rococo curvaceousness to border on the grotesque. It wasn't until this visit by the Bolshoi that I appreciated her strength and guts. She easily vaulted all of LaCotte's hurdles (making easy work of tricky things like a manége of chainés punctuated with big grand jetés, with, of course, no preparatory steps between), gobbling them up and, it seemed, eager for more. I think it's the best testament to the utter silliness beneath 'The Pharaoh's Daughter's' high-falutin pretension that it took a dancer like Zakharova who is perhaps the living embodiment of everything the old French/Imperial school did not stand for to bring this ballet to life in a way that transcends its patchwork, fussy attempts at an impossible authenticity. Petipa would have run screaming from Zakharova; she didn't even pretend to affect old-school primness and propriety, but blasted her way through the ballet with a bombastic zest which transcended its conceits while also perfectly embodying and even celebrating the inconsistencies and absurdities at its heart (and I admired the grand Tsiskaridze for following her lead, and for managing to keep up with her). Zakharova couldn't be bothered simply filling in the outlines of LaCotte's cartoonish and sketchy vision, but took a big fistful of bright crayons and colored madly and generously outside the lines, and I and my aching feet will always remember this performance with admiration and gratitude.

The quality of the supporting dancers varied tremendously, but I very much liked the attack and energy of the better soloist, like Ekatrina Krysanova's variation as the river Guadalquiver in the underwater divertissement, matching the flicker of LaCotte's fussy little rond de jambes perfectly to the clatter of Pugni's castanets. (This is, apparently, a very Iberian river, and I so wanted her to use scallop shells as castanets, but here, alas, the Bolshoi let me down). The other rivers, Ekaterina Shipulina as the Congo and Olga Strebletsova's climactic Neva, were also beautifully spirited. (This casting was the same for both performances). In the evening, Denis Medvedev breezed through the showy, comic solo for Wilson/Ta-Hor's assistant John Bull/Passiphonte, as did the wonderful and under-used Dmitry Gudanov's lead Fisherman. Both Anastasia Yatsenko (matinee) and Maria Alexandrova (evening) were spirited as Ramzé, Aspicia's Nubian slave, especially in the clever toe-taping solo which is one of the few surviving bits of Petipa in the ballet. The decision to put Ramzés retinue of four simpering children in black-face was a bit unfortunate.

Finally, I'd like to say a word for the Bolshoi corps. They are not the strongest or most refined or prettiest (cutting corners seems a bit of a Bolshoi religion, in fact, as nobody in the company has much use for turnout, except -- go figure -- Zakharova), but, as showed when the Bolshoi visited in 2000, they know how to move together, not just as an synchronized ensemble, but with drama that's subtle at an individual level, but when echoed throughout an entire body of dancers, gains power exponentially. They know how to sell, and sell divinely: the Bolshoi does "cast-of-thousands" better than any company I've seen, and can make silk shimmer and organza billow as if they were born swaddled in the stuff. As with the third-act entrance of the Toreadors and their molls in last week's 'Don Quixote,' I was struck almost speechless, again, by how magnificent these dancers are when they're just striding -- they don't quite strut, but like the best models on the catwalk, they know they're fabulous, and make sure we know it, too. After memory of all of the silly props, technical legerdemain (legerdepied?) and conceits have faded, I won't forget the thrill of the corps' entrance in the second-act court scene. The Pharaoh is upstage, at the top of a flight of stairs, and rank after rank of dancers in various semi-Egyptian garb enter from the wings, face the Pharaoh and bow to him in deep lunges, then turn, and as a body, march downstage towards us (I thought one didn't turn one's back on royalty, but perhaps things were different in those days). Again and again groups enter from the wings, bow, and march downstage to congregate on the sides making room for the next ensemble. The alacrity and utter simultaneity of those downstage processions, repeated, echoed and amplified with every dancer and grouping, hit me like a velvet-coated hammer. Damn, I thought, they're good. While brilliant principal dancers and soloists aren't exactly a dime a dozen, they seem that way when compared to that most rare bird, a truly organic corps. I'll put up with a lot of absurdity for even a few moments of such brilliance.

(does LaCotte's car have a "Glissades are for Wimps"
>bumpersticker?).

I so need a "cracking up with hysterical laughter" emoticon right now....

There's something about Pugni that sort of does me in.

I think I'd have liked "The Pharaoh's Daughter" more if it were even more absurd.

Oh, I forgot to mention the bit in the prologue where Bull holds up a painting on an easel for Lord Wilson to dab at very aesthetically, whilst he and his entourage are encircled by three disappointingly chaste belly dancers. And then the sandstorm, where they all get tossed about the stage by a wind no more palpable than the hot air emerging from the orchestra pit. Imagine Marcel Marceau with a hangover. It really was priceless.

And
>then the sandstorm, where they all get tossed about the
>stage by a wind no more palpable than the hot air emerging
>from the orchestra pit. Imagine Marcel Marceau with a
>hangover. It really was priceless.

Bruce, we need a 'dying of laughter' emoticon like a dancer needs new pointe shoes!

I remember being a little surprised when the Kirov also had kids in blackface for their Bayadere.

After seeing a video of Bournonville's 'Far From Denmark,' with its comic but profoundly incorrect blackfaced dancers complete with Brillo-haired wigs, I think I can safely say this is one ballet we'll never see again (or ever?) in the US. It's just too offensive, far more so than anything in Pharaoh's Daughter.

As part of the divertissements in 'La Sonnambula,' Balanchine made a charming little duet for a Blackamoor couple in blackface. Much later, Peter Martins changed their costumes and makeup so they're now vaguely Indian, and vaguely exotic. I can understand Martins' reasoning, and while I generally abhor the idea of tinkering with Balanchine, in this case I think it's acceptable. Their blackness had little to do with the story at hand, and could be dispensed with without harming the ballet as a whole.

On the other hand, in ABT's wonderful revival of Petrouchka, there was the Blackamoor in full black-face. And yet, even though parts of the character are clearly racist and offensive, I would be upset to see it changed -- such attitudes towards the unusual and exotic were common back in those days, and the ballet would be weakened considerably were the Blackamoor somehow transformed into another ethnicity (although any ethnic group with which that character might be associated would probably find it offensive -- he's not a nice guy).

So I guess I'm inconsistent.

I haven't seen any of the other ballets you mention besides La Bayadere, so I can't comment on how those sat with me. For some reason, in Pharaoh's Daughter, it seemed almost unnecessary, perhaps besides the slave? I don't think the kids needed it.

As was discussed on the Kirov's Bayadere thread, I do think these essential representations of the exotic/unknown/different do provide an insight into what perceptions were in the past (or sadly, might still be).

As a South Asian, there are parts of Bayadere (which I love - I proudly say that I'd be the first in line should anyone seek an authentically brown Nikiya!!! ) that just make me shake my head and laugh...(let's not even talk about the movies and current trends in 'tribal' fashion!). I even know Chinese-Americans who are offended by the tea dance in Nutcracker.

The slave makes sense to me (somewhat) in Pharaoh's daughter, and one could reasonably argue that the colour itself is important, as demarcating the political and social power relationship between North African and Sub-Saharan Africa.... although reading so deep into Pharaoh's Daughter would be comical in and of itself!

Eric, you may know better than I - was there any indication of the black faces in the original (or what little notes are left of Petipa's original? Do we know anything about production design from it?). I wonder what Lacotte's reasoning was.

I should explain that while Ramzé's child attendants simply darkened their faces, the slave who became a pincushion for the holy snake came out in full minstrel-show drag (except for the loincloth or whatever you call the things they were wearing). Dark dark makeup, full reddened lips, perhaps something done to make his eyes seem to bug out. The only things missing were a banjo and a watermelon.

This wasn't Placido Domingo doing Othello!

While I agree we shouldn't expect works of art from earlier generations to completely hew to modern sensibilities (although I can see how Chinese might find Tea offensive, I find it fairly well-intentioned, at least as done today), I don't think productions of those older works should be entirely blind to them. I am sure there have been (and continue to be) many productions of The Merchant of Venice with which I'd have some difficulty.