William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, published in the First Folio in 1623, is known by scholars as a “problem play” because it cannot be categorized easily. A surprisingly dark first act gives way to a happy ending, and almost-realistic human drama is paired with surprising bits of fantasy. For generations, scholars placed the play in the “comedy” category. Now, scholars call it a “romance,” enjoying the company of the Bard’s elegiacal The Tempest. The ballet version by Christopher Wheeldon, which premiered in 2014 at the Royal Opera House in London, is both confined and emboldened by these dualities. Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale joins better known and more easily adaptable works in the Shakespeare ballet canon, such as Kenneth MacMillan’s high-on-drama Romeo and Juliet and Frederick Ashton’s and George Balanchine’s broadly theatrical versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
For this New York premiere, American Ballet Theatre approached the ballet with emotional maturity and technical clarity. Its ensemble cast of characters suits ABT’s impressive roster of principals, but the strongest focus is Wheeldon’s interpretation of Leontes, with his tragic fall from grace, and a resolution that he barely deserves.
Wheeldon opens with a dimly lit prologue: King Leontes of Sicilia and King Polixenes of Bohemia are estranged childhood friends. Leontes marries Hermione with the gift of an emerald, and they have a son, Mamillius. Polixenes visits his old friend for nine months, at the end of which Hermione awaits, soon giving birth to a second child, and bids Polixenes stay.
On opening night, Aran Bell as Leontes effectively portrayed a sane man giving way to torturous thoughts of jealousy. Wheeldon demonstrates a mastery of storytelling through dance, eschewing (as Balanchine did) stuffy nineteenth-century mime, in favor of a movement language that is grounded and angular, a fusion of classical vocabulary with modern port de bras and torso contractions. Clad in a dark coat, Leontes broods in controlled adagio solos, interrupted by angular notes and sharp accents. In the absence of accessible melodies in Joby Talbot’s score, Wheeldon’s solos take on an inner thought structure of their own, propelled by hidden counts and phrasing not apparent in the orchestra. There’s a claustrophobia to this effect. Expertly building tension throughout, Wheeldon alternates spotlights between Leontes stalking Hermione (performed on opening night by the statuesque Devon Teuscher) and Polixenes (danced by Cory Stearns) innocently talking, and, with his increasingly distorted hold on reality, to Teuscher and Stearns performing a seductive garden pas de deux taking place entirely in his head.
Convinced that Hermione is pregnant with Polixenes’ child, Leontes publicly accuses her of adultery and has her arrested. In time, Paulina (Christine Shevchenko), the head of Hermione’s household, brings in Hermione’s second child, whom Leontes rejects as illegitimate. Mamillius, seeing his father abuse his mother, collapses from distress, dead. Overcome with despair, Hermione dies as well.
Meanwhile, Paulina’s husband, Antigonus (Roman Zhurbin), ventures to the mountains to abandon the baby but is killed by a bear in a surreal series of stage machinations.
The second act takes place in a colorful pastoral setting in Bohemia. Florizel, Polixenes’ son, danced boyishly by Carlos Gonzalez, falls in love with Perdita, Leontes’s now-grown daughter who has been saved and raised by shepherds in Bohemia. The muted noir quality of the first-act sets by designer Bob Crowley gives way to a Peter Pan–like fairy tale treehouse. The second act has little plot, but it does have the most dancing—ars gratia artis.
The story resumes when Polixenes comes to stop Florizel’s dalliance with Catherine Hurlin’s charming Perdita, thinking her a mere shepherdess. Florizel runs away with Perdita to gray and imposing Sicily, where he begs an older and grayer Leontes, who resembles a remorsefully clad figure from a Caspar David Friedrich painting, for protection. When Polixenes arrives in anger, the emerald that Leontes gave the long-dead Hermione is revealed and all are reunited.
Talbot’s sometimes repetitive score is surely this production’s greatest obstacle to reaching the canonical heights of the scores of Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Why must so much new prestige-ballet music be so spare? In the second act, the dancers move to a complex series of counts Wheeldon has devised from the incessant tooting of a single flute. Only at the ballet’s heightened emotional touchpoints—the fight between Leontes and Polixenes or the final awakening of Hermione from her stone-cold slumber—do music and movement properly wed. An exception is the colorful folk dancing performed by the shepherds in the second act, recalling perhaps the hearty corps de ballet sequences of happy peasants in Soviet “tractor ballets.”
The real centerpiece of the second act is the vibrant tree by Crowley—a bright contrast to the monochrome reality of the Sicilian court, with its imposing columns and statues, all in gray, dwarfing the human players. The other delightful touch was the makeshift ships by which Polixenes chases Perdita and Florizel back to the Court of Sicily. In the previous act, Crowley had used a charming old theater trick, a giant curtain with a bear painted on it, waving like a serpent above the cowering Antigonus. In the second act, the curtains become a sail, with the dancers scurrying onto the bow to create the scenic effect. There’s something more fun about this old-fashioned flare than watching the digital projection of a ship earlier in the ballet.
While Wheeldon does an impressive job of translating the story into pure dance, he struggles to overcome the inherent disjointedness of the narrative. The first act is shockingly dark, followed by a somewhat saccharine second act. The third act, however, contains the best pas de deux in the ballet, a bittersweet elegy of forgiveness, as Paulina reveals the statue of Hermione and Mamillius she has kept from Leontes; it begins to stir, and Hermione comes to life. With all his remorse bellowing to the surface, Leontes lays down at Hermione’s feet. They dance together, first circling each other tentatively, she resisting him at first, after so much pain.
Only when Perdita enters and sees her mother does the music swell, the justice of the resolution being reserved for the children. Just before Leontes leaves with his newly reunited family, he glances back at the statue of Mamillius, still frozen. Shevchenko enters as Paulina in a series of mournful arabesque lunges. As Leontes joins his family, Paulina is left on the floor, her back arched to the ceiling, alone with the statue of Mamillius, still frozen. Some loss remains untouched.
If the narrative feels disjointed and the music a little spare in sound, Wheeldon succeeds in a conveying the layers of the story in dance, with a number of inventive solos, pas de deux, and corps de ballet sequences, which, along with Crowley’s designs create a world in which the audience can linger. Leontes may not have the romantic appeal of Romeo, but he makes a compelling balletic antihero.
