The high school I attended had students from the Virginia
School of the Arts come part time. Apparently in Virginia, “The Arts” means
ballet so my school was teaming with borderline anorexic females who could also
snap my neck with their muscular legs. It is a terrifying combination.
In all that time, the only ballet I ever saw was the local
community center’s “Nutcracker.” Even though I had a few friends in it who did
very well, I decided I didn’t like ballet. It was boring and slow and no one
sang or even talked!
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| The Virginia School of the Arts |
Fast forward 10 years and I fancy myself a cultured snob. I
love attending the theatre, I pretend
to enjoy opera, and I watch art films and act like they don’t suck. I figured
it was time to give ballet another go. Maybe if I saw a professional
performance it would be different.
Ballet West in Salt Lake City is, apparently, a
well-respected company. I looked at their season online and opted for an original
performance of Beauty and the Beast.
How can you go wrong with a classic like that?
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| This was not the show we saw. Unfortunately. |
I guess I don’t really know what I was expecting out of the
experience, but I know it’s not what I got.
To begin with, the show started at 7pm on a Friday. SLC is
40 minutes away and we left Provo at 5:45. Doing the math, we should have
arrived in plenty of time to find parking, make our way to the theater, get
situated in our seats, and enjoy the opening of the show.
Turns out, General Conference weekend + mission reunions +
Friday rush hour + Utah construction + bad luck = a 90 minute drive to SLC. We
missed the first act and I was not a happy camper. Road rage is something I
struggle with anyway and knowing that this ballet I paid for was slipping away
from me was the cherry on top of my stressed out sundae.
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| The Capitol Theater in SLC. |
We finally made it to the theater, parked, and rushed inside
to find an enormous group of people waiting at the theater doors. Not only were
there are fair number of people stuck in the same traffic, but a lot of
regulars thought the show started at 7:30. Even a couple friends from our ward
were there, having fought the same losing battle we had just emerged from. We
waited the 15 minutes or so until intermission and then went in to find our
seats.
I’m not sure how we swung it, but we were second row and the
view was fantastic. We were not concerned about missing the first act since
this is a fairly well-known story, but it turns out our lack of research did
not do us any favors. This was not a professional, Ballet West show. This was a
second-string and student performance meant for families. What does this mean?
Well, it means that it wasn’t very good.
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| Some of the cast, bless their hearts. |
The dancing was, admittedly, beautiful. I’m no expert and I’m
sure they weren’t as good as they could have been, but I still enjoyed the choreography
quite a bit. What I didn’t like, however, was the narration. In an attempt to
make ballet more accessible to children, narration and dialogue were recorded
and played over much of the action. Poorly written and poorly delivered, it did
nothing but cheapen the experience for me. The three year old behind me,
however, seemed to love it.
The best part was the curtain call sequence. Many characters we had
missed from the first act came out to do a little jig as their bow and there
were a couple who were incredible. I realized that maybe act one was better and
we really had missed out on something good.
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| A disappointment. |
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