Without Lorena Feijoo and Joan Boada to play the stars in Don Quixote, San Francisco Ballet comes into the end of their season like the Giants going into the home stretch without Barry Bonds. The team may be good enough anyway: opening night was full of thrills.
Don Q is an old-fashioned story-ballet that is a huge crowd-pleaser no matter what, since it offers spectacular scenery and costumes, Spaniards, toreadors sticking knives in the floor, a gypsy-camp for the lovers to flee to, two juicy roles for clowns, windmills to tilt at, and staggering displays of classical technique. But it is kind of a guilty pleasure for ballet-lovers without a ballerina of Feijoo's gifts, which make her one of the greatest interpreters of the role of Kitri anywhere in the world today.
Don Q without Feijoo is like Stagecoach without John Wayne, or Woman of the Year without Katharine Hepburn. It's a story of a woman's right to choose, and the ballerina needs to have heroic properties: Feijoo makes it inevitable that crazy old Don Quixote will put his lance at her service, for her personality is so strong that (within the story) she can't be ground down, and (within the ballet) she can't be overwhelmed by the shaggy succession of production numbers that tend to make us forget milder ballerinas when they're not onstage.
Without Feijoo, it's still great fun; you can't take it seriously, but you don't have to. For opening night, SFB gave us the whole first string: the front line at the curtain calls was almost all principal dancers, with major stars in the two mime roles (Pascal Molat as the Don's squire Sancho Panza; and Damian Smith hilarious as the foppish suitor Gamache). Muriel Maffre, whose farewell performance coming up on May 6 is already going-on sold-out, received colossal applause as the street dancer, and nearly stole the show from the ballerina, Vanessa Zahorian, who had danced Kitri with brilliant technique and gusto, though without the earthiness it takes to make Kitri seem like a real inn-keeper's daughter. Her partner, Davit Karapetyan, brought enough testosterone to the stage to make up for Zahorian's lack of heat, and supplied us with such a variety of spectacular, whirling, scything jumps, he'd have trumped every performer I've ever seen in the role if his pirouettes had not lost focus every now and then.
Helgi Tomasson made his new production in 2003 "because we have the dancers," using the help of then-principal dancer Yuri Possokhov (who came to SF from Moscow, where he'd grown up in the fabled Bolshoi Ballet production of the ballet and "danced every role except the lead"). Don Q premiered to huge acclaim with Feijoo and Boada as the leads, with many roles filled out by dancers who grew up with the style — either Spaniards from Spain, or Soviet/Cuban-Communist-trained dancers who know the Russian way of being Spanish.
Spanish glamour
There were thrilling performances at every level last Saturday. Intense Spanish glamour poured from Moises Martin as the toreador Espada, Jaime Garcia Castillo as a member of his entourage, and Dores Andre as Kitri's friend. Hansuke Yamamoto led the gypsy troops in a fantastically passionate dance, which contrasted well with the delicacy of the Dryads who appear to Don Quixote in his comatose state after he tries to fight with a windmill and loses badly.
The old-fashioned ballets rarely had to reach as far as this one does to included a visionary scene of nymphs in tutus — but it's quite poignant, nonetheless, to see Don Q get up from his sickbed and walk into his own dream, and have his vision of Kitri content to lean on his arm and dance with him. The choreography for this scene is probably all that remains from the original 1869 staging; it's like a Las Vegas fountain-display.
Yuan Yuan Tan danced more beautifully than I have ever seen her before as the Queen of the visionary creatures in this scene. She'd dart across the stage, and rise suddenly from her new position like a fountain ascending, and hover miraculously in place as if there were never-ending energy buoying her up.