LONDON — Twelve white-robed, veiled brides stand immobile onstage because the curtain rises on Christopher Wheeldon’s new full-length “Like Water for Chocolate,” for the Royal Ballet. Slowly the ladies again away, then flip. Now, they’re dressed in black, a row of crones, who sit and start to knit because the motion begins.
It’s an arresting, painterly starting for this three-act ballet, primarily based on the novel by the Mexican author Laura Esquivel, which opened on Thursday at the Royal Opera House here. In this succinct picture, Wheeldon (and the designer Bob Crowley) suggests the intermingling of life and dying, of the fantastical and the sensible, the magical and the true, that permeate Esquivel’s a lot beloved story. For a second, evidently making a ballet primarily based on a sophisticated plot involving cooking, meals and magic, isn’t essentially a horrible thought.
Wheeldon is an skilled creator of story ballets (he made “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “The Winter’s Tale” for the Royal Ballet) and has directed and choreographed two Broadway reveals, together with “MJ: The Musical,” for which he has been nominated for a Tony Award.
It’s testomony to his abilities and his workforce of standard collaborators that he has succeeded in making a big-spectacle ballet for this story centered on meals and a frustrated-love affair, with excursions into the Mexican revolution, flashbacks to varied misplaced loves, weddings, infants, deaths and ghostly visitations.
Joby Talbot’s commissioned rating (impressively performed by Alondra de la Parra, who served as music guide) is serviceably lush, making utilizing of guitar, diversified percussion and Mexican devices just like the ocarina. Crowley’s décor, influenced by the Mexican architect Luis Barragán, is spare and ingenious; Natasha Katz’s lighting adroitly suggests modifications in time and place.
The ballet, a coproduction with American Ballet Theater, nods to the Royal Ballet’s narrative traditions, and, judging by the response on Thursday, is more likely to discover an enthusiastic viewers. Choreographically although, it is just intermittently fascinating; typically it feels trapped in Story Ballet Land, a world in which actions are demonstratively telegraphed in the service of exposition.
After the placing opening scene, we’re in the kitchen, with Tita (Francesca Hayward) and the cook dinner Nacha (Christina Arestis). In brief order, we study that Tita and Pedro (Marcelino Sambé) are in love; that Mama Elena (Laura Morera, scary) forbids Tita to marry as a result of household custom decrees she should take care of her mom; that Pedro chooses to marry Tita’s elder sister Rosaura (Mayara Magri) to remain close by; that Tita’s tears in the marriage cake batter trigger the friends to be overcome by remorse and nausea (and the trustworthy cook dinner to die when recalling her misplaced love). And that’s simply the primary two scenes.
But Wheeldon comes into his personal in an early fantasy sequence, when Tita’s repressed need for Pedro is transmuted by her cooking to her different sister, Getrudis (Anna Rose O’Sullivan). Wheeldon creates a wonderful flooring present to a danzón tango rhythm, with Getrudis because the pinup middle of a gaggle of bare-chested males, earlier than she is swooped up by a swashbuckling bandit (Cesar Corrales) on a (wire) horse.
As the ballet progresses, Wheeldon is much less burdened by narrative exposition, and freer to create these sorts of pure-dance set items. A beautiful fiesta dance, and a joyous ultimate marriage ceremony dance each use earthy, grounded motion that means folks dances with out referencing particular traditions; the music follows go well with. These group numbers have, in a great way, a type of Broadway aptitude. So does the evocation of Mama Elena’s tragic previous, a mini-Romeo and Juliet story instructed in a skillful five-minute ballet-within-the-ballet, and her demonlike ultimate reappearance as a giantess in an enormous, trailing costume.
But too typically the ballet’s choreography is merely expository, with lengthy tracts of forgettable passages illustrating subplots. Although Wheeldon tries to search out leitmotifs for his characters (anguished foot flexing for Tita, stabbing lunges for Elena), he doesn’t evoke an actual sense of character. Tita and Pedro, superbly danced by Hayward and Sambé, stay unfocused figures, whose skilfully constructed pas de deux blur right into a generalized evocation of pissed off longing, whereas Tita’s relationship with the kindly Doctor John Brown (an underused Matthew Ball), feels dutifully labored in.
In the ballet’s ultimate moments, nevertheless, comes a pas de deux for Tita and Pedro that’s the equal of any Wheeldon has created. Like his mesmerizing “After the Rain,” it presents two figures transferring by an summary panorama. To a haunting music primarily based on Octavio Paz’s poem “Sunstone,” sung by Siân Griffiths, Sambé and Hayward transfer with liquid magnificence by a sequence of spiraling, cross-body swirls and excessive, off-kilter lifts earlier than being engulfed by flame-lit clouds, behind which we glimpse the white-clad brides we noticed at the beginning.
It’s a coup de théâtre finale, one in every of many visually breathtaking moments in the ballet. But it’s additionally the place the dance reveals us one thing greater than a story thought. The spare purity of the ultimate pas de deux presents a glimpse of the unity of physique and spirit, emotion refined into abstraction. There is loads that’s entertaining in “Like Water for Chocolate”; right here, Wheeldon reveals he can do rather more.
“Like Water for Chocolate”
Through June 17 on the Royal Opera House, London; roh.org.uk.
