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The production, which began its week-long run on June 30, featured Julie Kent as Hanna Glawari—the wealthy, marriage-seeking widow of a bankrupt, make-believe nation (Pontevedro). Unbelievably, Hanna’s choice of mate will determine her country’s economic fate. Jose Manuel Carreño, who plays Count Danilo Danilovitch, first secretary of the Pontevedrian embassy, is the suitor favored by the political entourage. The count’s successful marriage proposal would keep Hanna’s money, which is the country’s GDP, from being spent and stored abroad.

Ronald Hynd’s ballet based on the 1906 operetta by Franz Lehár received its premiere in Australia in 1975. Commissioned by artistic director of the Australian Ballet, Sir Robert Helpmann retooled the plot for dancing and hired John Lanchbery to re-orchestrate Lehár’s score. The Merry Widow was the Australian Ballet’s first full-length production, and it was a comic hit. Many of the gags in Monday night’s show didn’t quite make it, perhaps because the cast didn’t run the production in full costume and set until that afternoon.

Nonetheless, as the widow Hanna, Kent’s appealing hauteur and sang-froid made her first night’s performance a marvel. While corps members, soloists and other principals made apparent their lack of rehearsal—as they struggled with spacing, costuming and throwing their goblets to the wings without breaking anything— Kent sailed through the night as though she had been doing Hanna all season. Why the connection between Kent and Carreño, the featured lovers, never reached necessary combustion, I don’t know. If it had, the ballet might have felt less flimsy.

Julie Kent and Jose Manuel Carreno in The Merry Widow
© Gene Schiavone

Fortunately, Xiomara Reyes, who performed as Valencienne, and Gennadi Saveliev, who played her lover Camille de Rosillon, provided some much-needed eros in Act II. In the lifted arms of Saveliev, Reyes glowed above him like a flame. She bent toward his muscular manipulations as though he was the oxygen by which she gave fire. They levitated through the space in Hynd’s poetically crafted pas de deux. Also miraculous was Joseph Phillips’s Act II folk dance solo. Phillips’s ability to bounce up from every jump in vertical splendor was awesome. The orchestra, under conductor Ormsby Wilkins, energized the hard-working dancers who at curtain call looked thankful that the first night's run was over.