gramilano

Accord­ing to the Wall Street Journal the New York audi­ence was on its feet to applaud the open­ing of Anna Karen­ina with the Mari­in­sky Bal­let. Alastair Macaulay in The New York Times was not impressed.

As bad bal­lets go, Alexei Rat­mansky’s two-act “Anna Karen­ina” is one of the best. It tells its pot­ted ver­sion of Tolstoy’s novel with a fair bit of nar­rat­ive clar­ity; it man­ages many com­plex changes of scene deftly; its décor and cos­tumes (by Mikael Melbye) are gen­er­ally eleg­ant; its extens­ive use of video pro­jec­tions (by Wend­all Har­ring­ton) is unusual and effect­ive; and most of its lead­ing char­ac­ters are imme­di­ately iden­ti­fi­able and dis­tinct. But these vir­tues don’t suf­fice. The bal­let is a com­plete waste of everybody’s time…

… Sev­eral of Mr. Ratmansky’s bal­lets are pleas­ing, a few mar­velous. It would be nice to argue that “Anna Karen­ina” is really a good bal­let with flaws. Yet it’s just not good enough for that…

… Unfor­tu­nately, at the cli­max of Act II it’s replaced by a black-and-white video pro­jec­tion of a train, fast advan­cing straight at us. Anna lies down in front of it and wriggles a bit, whereupon there is a vast amount of white smoke. The end. When the cur­tain calls began on Monday, the smoke rendered the dan­cers nearly invisible…

Macaulay did appre­ci­ate the efforts of the interpreters:

Diana Vish­neva was impec­cable as Anna: gor­geous, com­pel­ling, simple, eloquent.

After­wards, spe­cial (and remark­ably heat-resistant) pat­rons revived them­selves with chilled pea soup at the Man­darin a few blocks away, said Bloomberg. The din­ner benefited the White Nights Found­a­tion, the U.S. fund-raising arm of St. Petersburg’s Mari­in­sky Theatre. Quite a party: Tolstoy’s clas­sic was placed on every seat, vodka was passed in ice cubes and DJ Gab­riel Prokofiev—the conductor’s grandson—took to the turntables.

The night’s lead­ing man Yuri Smekalov, who replaced Kon­stantin Zverev as Vron­sky, was in New York for the first time with his wife, Vlada. “But in few days I’m cheat­ing on my hus­band and see­ing ‘Catch Me If You Can’ while he’s per­form­ing,” said Ms. Smekalova. “I’ve seen way too many tra­gic Anna Karen­i­nas in our life­time.” — She just might find Alastair Macaulay sit­ting beside her.

Pho­tos: top, Diana Vish­neva as Anna Karen­ina — Ruby Washington/The New York Times; bot­tom, Kristina Kova­lenko, Yuri Smerkalov and Diana Vish­neva - Hoffmann/Patrick McMullan

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