Photo by Rachel Malehorn
Davit Hovhannisyan and Marize Fumero in Milwaukee Ballet's ‘Dracula’
Davit Hovhannisyan and Marize Fumero in Milwaukee Ballet's ‘Dracula’
I can’t imagine a better production of Michael Pink’s internationally celebrated Dracula than the one I saw last weekend at the Marcus Performing Arts Center.
I’m not the only one who felt that way. The instantaneous standing ovation and colossal applause, whoops and cheering was like nothing I’d experienced at a ballet performance. Likewise, the audience’s dead silence when they’d customarily applaud a remarkable dance feat or production number was unusual. Applause was inappropriate. The performance was too spellbinding. No one on stage was performing for us. They were playing for real. It was scary.
The final ovation quadrupled in size as Davit Hovhannisyan—still gliding slowly, solemnly, as if on air as Count Dracula—arrived for his bow. This performance was his farewell gift after twenty years as a leading dancer. I’ve come to know him well enough through interviews to guess that he was thrilled for the entire cast and crew. He loves this company.
Photo by Rachel Malehorn
Davit Hovhannisyan in Milwaukee Ballet's ‘Dracula’
Davit Hovhannisyan in Milwaukee Ballet's ‘Dracula’
Cheering shook the hall a second time when guest conductor Matthew Kasper took the stage and acknowledged the 40 instrumentalists of Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra and eight guest singers from the Florentine Opera. Philip Feeney’s musical score, including thumps, bangs, heartbeats, cries and a shocking explosion, is wild beyond belief. I’m sure it’s difficult to execute. When performed this well, it has enormous impact. This was nationally acclaimed Kasper’s first time conducting in Milwaukee. I hope it’s not his last.
Lez Brotherston’s sets and costumes from the original 1996 production by England’s Northern Ballet under David Grill’s horror show lighting remain extremely stunning.
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The wordless art form of ballet turns prose into poetry. A rough outline of Bram Stoker’s famous novel provides a frame of reference here, but details evaporate, expanding interpretive possibilities.
Count Dracula is a predatory member of some European aristocracy, but more of an idea than a human being; an ideology, perhaps; something very male. His power is to mesmerize. He then assaults his victims bodily. Forever traumatized, they mirror him. They serve as minions, spreading his madness. But they can only operate in darkness. The light of day destroys them.
My jaw was often on the floor during this superb performance. The surrealistic prologue and realistic first act portray a nightmare. Jonathan Harker is the dreamer. Newly wedded to Mina and back in England, he relives his trip to Transylvania.
He remembers watching villagers outside the castle. For this scene, Pink transformed the merry peasant dance of traditional ballet into a grotesquerie of crumpled peasants worshipping a gutted wolf, and an anguished mother presenting her dead baby.
We see Harker in bed, a guest in Dracula castle. Three female vampires descend on him, half-strip him and wholly-maul the helpless fellow in their lust for blood. But Dracula lures them off with a blood-soaked sack of dead animals. He wants Harker for himself. He lifts the shaken, spellbound visitor into the air, throws him across the room, and then into a herculean ballet pas de deux. It’s a lengthy assault in extreme ballet form, beautiful, terrible, awesome. The choreographic demands are beastly.
Randy Crespo danced Harker on opening night. He and Hovhannisyan were perfect partners. We saw two great dancers in top form perform with no holds barred and never a break in character. It ends as the Count is about to bite. In a flash, we’re back in England and Harker, awake in bed, screams for beloved Mina to comfort him. It turns out that Dracula hungers for Mina.
There’s no trace of camp in Pink’s horror ballet. It’s a nightmare as dark as the world. It becomes the world as you watch it.
In Act Two, Dracula arrives in England in search of Mina. He feeds on Mina’s best friend Lucy, a spirited young woman exquisitely danced by Marize Fumero, with two ardent suitors. We find the friends in a two-level hotel lobby where guests dance and mingle among the staff. Your eyes fly from character to character, there’s so much entertaining action. Dracula’s arrival overwhelms the crowd. They move in slow motion while Dracula rapes, sorry, bites spellbound Lucy.
Photo by Rachel Malehorn
Marize Fumero in Milwaukee Ballet's ‘Dracula’
Marize Fumero in Milwaukee Ballet's ‘Dracula’
We move to Van Helsing’s sanatorium where Mina, Harker, and the boyfriends nurse Lucy, and Garrett Glassman begins his excellent performance as mad Renfield. The act ends with a thrilling pas de deux by Hovhannisyan and Fumero. Lucy joins the Undead.
As Mina, Lahna Vanderbush danced the graceful, powerful hero of the final act. It features a “Blood Mass” in which Renfield is food for a legion of Undead. Forced by Dracula to drink blood from his gashed chest at the climax of their harrowing pas de deux, Mina leads the team to his lair and his spectacular death in the sunlight.
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Darkness falls on all but Mina. She walks toward the audience, touches her neck, and vanishes.
