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, based mostly 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 actual, that permeate Esquivel’s a lot liked story. For a second, it appears that evidently making a ballet based mostly on an advanced plot involving cooking, meals and magic, isn’t essentially a horrible concept.
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 exhibits, together with “MJ: The Musical,” for which he has been nominated for a Tony Award.
It’s testomony to his expertise and his crew 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 carried out by Alondra de la Parra, who served as music marketing consultant) is serviceably lush, making utilizing of guitar, diverse 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 adjustments 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; usually it feels trapped in Story Ballet Land, a world in which actions are demonstratively telegraphed in the service of exposition.
After the hanging opening scene, we’re in the kitchen, with Tita (Francesca Hayward) and the prepare dinner Nacha (Christina Arestis). In brief order, we be taught 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 visitors to be overcome by remorse and nausea (and the devoted prepare 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 want for Pedro is transmuted via her cooking to her different sister, Getrudis (Anna Rose O’Sullivan). Wheeldon creates a fabulous 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 last marriage ceremony dance each use earthy, grounded motion that means people dances with out referencing particular traditions; the music follows swimsuit. These group numbers have, in a great way, a sort of Broadway aptitude. So does the evocation of Mama Elena’s tragic previous, a mini-Romeo and Juliet story informed in a skillful five-minute ballet-within-the-ballet, and her demonlike last reappearance as a giantess in an enormous, trailing costume.
But too usually 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 annoyed longing, whereas Tita’s relationship with the kindly Doctor John Brown (an underused Matthew Ball), feels dutifully labored in.
In the ballet’s last moments, nonetheless, 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 gives two figures transferring via an summary panorama. To a haunting tune based mostly on Octavio Paz’s poem “Sunstone,” sung by Siân Griffiths, Sambé and Hayward transfer with liquid magnificence via 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 first.
It’s a coup de théâtre finale, considered one of many visually breathtaking moments in the ballet. But it’s additionally the place the dance exhibits us one thing greater than a story concept. The spare purity of the ultimate pas de deux gives a glimpse of the unity of physique and spirit, emotion refined into abstraction. There is a lot that’s entertaining in “Like Water for Chocolate”; right here, Wheeldon exhibits he can do rather more.
“Like Water for Chocolate”
Through June 17 on the Royal Opera House, London; roh.org.uk.
