Swan Lake performed by San Francisco Ballet is probably the best you’ll ever see. The timeless classic of love and deception fell in the right hands — or in this case, pointe shoes — of Nikisha Fogo in her debut as Swan Queen on Feb. 23. Her seemingly-endless fouttés made me dizzy on her behalf.
And while I never saw Swan Lake before last week, the music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky of course has been a soundtrack in my life since childhood, played in uncounted television and movie montages. Experiencing all of it live at the War Memorial Opera House may have been the first time this cynic was genuinely enchanted by a stage performance in at least several years.
I’ll add though that ballets are silent movies. The plot unfolds in front of us by watching the dancers’ beautiful movements, and the most entertaining one I saw recently was from Giselle, when the title character danced around clearly saying, “No, he’s mine!”
His fiancée replies in very Beyoncé fashion: “Sorry girl, he put a ring on this finger.”
I knew enough of Swan Lake to anticipate tragedy — the prince falls for one swan but then a lookalike deceives him. These cautionary tales we’ve heard in countless bedtime stories, onstage and in film; Beauty and the Beast, the Little Mermaid, and Cinderella all ask a pure-hearted character to look beyond their enchanted counterpart and fall in love with the person inside.
But at the opening of Swan Lake, still I wondered: Why is Prince Siegfried falling for a swan? We see Odette transformed in a chilling opening scene curated by recently departed choreographer Helgi Tomasson. As Odette stands just offstage, the evil Von Rothbart flourishes his hand, and her shadow turns from human to bird.
I put no blame on San Francisco Ballet for my confusion. Watching the show, I just wanted to know why the black swan later shows up like it’s a totally chill thing to happen at a house party, and whether all the other swans were similarly enchanted by the evil sorcerer.
And if that were the case, why didn’t Jessica Fletcher a la Murder, She Wrote show up and go, “Say, has anyone else noticed all these white swans around, and that the town maidens have gone mysteriously missing?”
I asked the Swan Lake stans in the lobby during two intermissions, and everyone had their own take. Most people agreed that Odette was fully a swan and not — as I later learned finally reading the backstory — a cursed woman whose spell made her a bird in the daytime, while taking human form at night. None of us Googled this before donning our eveningwear.
Not that it actually mattered in the hands of such a stellar corps. Everyone shines in this rendition, including Aaron Robison as the prince, Nathaniel Remez as Von Rothbart, Katita Waldo as the queen mother, and the cygnets in the iconic 4-ballerina dance we all know, played on opening night by Katherine Barkman, Isabella DeVivo, Norika Matsuyama, and Julia Rowe.
I am not the expert to fully criticize or praise the movements performed by these world-class dancers, but I’ll echo two points I read elsewhere that feel true to the show I witnessed on Friday:
The Regency-era costumes by Jonathan Fensom feature empire-waist dresses that hide some of the ballerinas’ work in Act 1. And I don’t remember who said it, but the swan ballerinas more than any other element made alive the amazing stage scenes by Fensom, Jennifer Tipton, and Sven Ortel; I was never more excited than when a bevy of feathered, glittery tutus glided across the stage in unison.
With a $60 million donation just recently tucked under its belt, the San Francisco Ballet is perhaps the most alive right now among our amazing local fine arts offerings. It is also the first American company that showed this time-honored classic nearly a century ago in 1940. I hope you walk away from this production with as many chills as I did, and when you go, see it in style:
See Swan Lake during its run through March 3 or when it returns April 30 through May 5.
Saul Sugarman is editor in chief of The Bold Italic.
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