Photo Credit: Nathaniel Davauer
With Beauty and the Beast, Michael Pink adds another full-length ballet to a body of work that includes his original takes on such disparate literary sources as Dracula, Peter Pan, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Snow White and The Picture of Dorian Gray. “With this one,” he said, “I have to be careful that I’ve made a piece for all ages, in particular because the expectations of the young ones are so high in terms of what they think they’re going to see after Disney.”
This won’t be Disney. It will, however, be a colorful spectacle to rival The Nutcracker in scale and variety. A new score by Philip Feeney, Pink’s collaborator of 30 years, will be given first life by conductor Andrews Sill and the Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra. Scenic designer Todd Edward Ivins (Mirror Mirror), costume designer Paul Daigle (La Bohème) and lighting designer David Grill (almost all the above) are the stellar production team. There are 92 costumes for a cast featuring both the professional and pre-professional companies and a multitude of youngsters from Milwaukee Ballet School and Academy. The role of Belle will be premiered by Nicole Teague-Howell and Annia Hidalgo, the Beast by Isaac Sharratt and Patrick Howell—all highly capable actor-dancers, just right for the characters as Pink has conceived them after years of thought.
We can expect art works to speak of the time of their creation. Pink based his script on a mid-18th-century adaptation of the fairytale by French writer Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, who was herself inspired by an earlier version by the woman writer Gabrielle Villeneuve. “What are the chances of that?” Pink exclaimed. “Two women of that era writing without pseudonyms. It’s very much a woman’s story. It supports the idea that women are powerful people who need to be heard and need to be listened to.”
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“Belle is the hero,” he continued. “She has a strong will, determination, imagination and she’s looking for something different than the norms of her community. She’s prepared to put herself in harm’s way and substitutes herself for her father when he gets into trouble with the Beast. She undertakes this enormously risky endeavor, not knowing how it will end.”
A Selfish Oaf
In a more radical update, Pink’s Beast is not an animal. “He’s a beastly person,” Pink said. “He’s a clumsy, selfish oaf who doesn’t understand how to be caring because he’s a privileged prince who gets everything he wants at the click of his finger.” When he spurns a group of starving children, the offspring of slaves, an enchantress causes thorny rose vines to wrap around his chest. They’ll tighten, break his heart and kill him if he doesn’t learn to love. “I find the idea of a hairy animal too restrictive,” Pink said. “The rose is the important part. When Belle’s father says, ‘I’m going on a journey, what would you like me to bring you?’ she answers, ‘I’d like a simple rose.’ But a rose isn’t simple, it’s very complex. It’s a symbol of life, of love, of blood.”
So when dad plucks a rose for Belle from the Beast’s garden and the dying vine-wrapped prince demands a daughter in exchange, Belle volunteers. “It dawned on me while I was researching the story that perhaps the adventure Belle is seeking, the adventure that is beyond the confines of her community, is the encounter with the Beast. It wasn’t to discover the cure for cancer or something, although it could very well have been that. She wouldn’t know it when she started out, but for me that became the adventure.”
Belle has two sisters in this version. They’re courted by twin brothers from the family’s community. This subplot allowed Pink to create “almost a separate ballet,” he said, “very different from the story in the castle.” The worlds collide when Belle reappears in the midst of her siblings’ double wedding, freed by the Beast to decide if she’ll return to him. He’s placed her happiness above his life.
Along with roses, Belle loves reading. She rejects the finery the Beast would lavish on her but is grateful that her castle room is filled with books. In Pink’s words, “It’s a place of confidence and solace where she’s got an arsenal of literary characters that have faced difficulties and created pathways to deal with them and gotten through it.” Pink will bring the characters onstage as Belle reads: Red Riding Hood and her Wolf, the three little pigs and theirs, Rapunzel, Pinocchio and the Pied Piper. “At that age, she was probably reading War and Peace,” he acknowledged, “but marching soldiers and Anna Karenina might have been a tad heavy.” Again, he’s caring for the young ones, our nation’s future.
Books and ballets help us know one another. Without that, love isn’t possible.
7:30 p.m., April 12-14 and 1:30 p.m., April 14 and 15 at Uihlein Hall in the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, 929 N. Water St. For tickets, call 414-902-2103 or visit milwaukeeballet.org.
