Spectacularly disappointing
Mikhailovsky Ballet
London Coliseum
It is somewhat refreshing that the 2008 summer ballet season in London is not monopolised by either the Bolshoi or the Kirov/Mariinsky ballet companies as it has been for the past few years. The presence of two rarely seen formations, such as the Mikhailovsky Ballet and the National Ballet of China, has caused a nice stir in the sleepy world of ballet, and flocks of international balletomanes have converged on London.
I am not sure that opening the former’s season with a new production of Spartacus was a good idea, though. Spartacus is to Russian ballet what Aida is to 19th-century Italian opera: brassy, spectacular, colossal, often edging between ultimate spectacle and a pure explosion of truly bad taste. The ballet, popularised by the 1968 version choreographed by Yuri Grigorovich for the Bolshoi Ballet and filmed in 1976, is, in a nutshell, a sword-and-sandal B movie in pointe shoes. It relies on a large deployment of characters and on a fine display of female breasts squeezed into skimpy pseudo-Roman attires, bulging biceps and, in the Mikhailovsky new version, a great deal of fashionably waxed male buttocks and thighs as well.
In this new version by George Kovtun, Khachaturian’s 1954 score includes an active and almost constant participation of singing chorus and soloists, whose presence enhances greatly the operatic feel hinted at above. Like Aida, and its renowned productions in the Arena at Verona complete with horses and elephants, this production should have also had a live tiger walking around, but it seems that the animal, seen on Russian stages, did not make it to London.
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