PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Frohna
I hope Ted Kivitt took great pride in the performance of Coppélia that opened Milwaukee Ballet’s 50th season last weekend. Kivitt, a star of American Ballet Theater in the 1960s and ’70s, danced the male lead in Coppélia when it was this company’s first-ever full-length production 50 years ago. In fact, he’d come to town some months before that to help birth Milwaukee’s first professional ballet with a showcase of dances at UW-Milwaukee. Then, from 1980-1986, he oversaw the company’s growth as its artistic director. Now, as an honored audience member for the company’s newest Coppélia, I trust he saw and felt the value and importance of all that work, for Milwaukee Ballet surely stands among the nation’s greats.
The joy, skill and warmth of the performers, the fullness of the characterizations and the clarity of the storytelling in this laugh-out-loud comic classic created for me a kind of enchantment in this dark time. I was blissfully lost in it. The intoxicating music by Léo Delibes played a big role in that, much thanks to conductor Pasquale Laurino’s perfect tempos and the rich playing of the orchestra. Anyone who’s taken ballet lessons as a child will have that heart-lifting signature mazurka from Act One sewn into their soul.
The fairy-tale scenery and costumes were borrowed, and I hope the Richmond and Louisville Ballets will forgive me for saying that our man David Grill’s lighting greatly heightened their effectiveness. The spooky doll workshop in Act Two appeared like a hallucination, an effect enhanced by the fact that the valiant dancers playing life-size dolls—today, they might be androids—held so still for such long periods I thought they were mannequins. Their sudden mechanical movements, when called for, were spectacular. Of course, it was Michael Pink’s choreography and staging and the all-around terrific performances that turned this ballet from 1870 into something truly immediate.
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I can’t say enough about Marize Fumero’s tireless performance in the central role. Whether balanced on the point of one foot with the other above her head or executing strings of spins and leaps, she was fully in character, her face and body a perfect expression of Swanhilda’s inner life at every moment. In the Kivitt role, Davit Hovhannisyan surely pleased his forerunner with his power, grace and humor. And in the crucial role of the doll maker, Timothy O’Donnell made this outsider complex and tragic.
