You don’t need to know anything about classical dance or Cervantes to thoroughly enjoy San Francisco Ballet’s “Don Quixote.” This is pure entertainment: fluffy costumes, comic high jinks, and even a live horse or two. But this is also serious dancing of the most refined caliber, received with a rousing standing ovation at the War Memorial Opera House on Saturday, Feb. 26, when a superpowered cast opened a nine-performance run.
At the center of the success Saturday night were two great dancers and an even greater partnership.
Born in Japan, Misa Kuranaga first came to San Francisco Ballet as an apprentice more than two decades ago, having won a prize at the Prix de Lausanne ballet competition. Despite her gifts, however, she decided that she needed more training and went back to school — the School of American Ballet — before dancing with Boston Ballet for 16 years and finally circling back to our coast. The extra formative work paid off. Her technique proved rock-solid as she caught freeze-frame balances and whipped through turns, including a torrent of double-fouettés in the famously stunt-filled final act. Her partner, Angelo Greco, might have been the even greater attraction, rotating almost horizontal to the floor in the physics-defying jumps of the grand pas de deux.
But what kept the energy high through the night was how these two work together, matched not only in physical dimensions but in temperament: confident, spontaneous, unpretentious. They danced without ever breaking character, and like they had nothing to lose.
Oh yes, there is a storyline here, though it has little to do with the titular novel. Don Quixote does suit up for knightly adventures with his sidekick Sancho Panza and go tilting at windmills. But the main action follows young Kitri and her mischievous boyfriend Basilio, who have to thwart her father’s plan to marry her off to the moneyed, foppish Gamache (played to perfection by Myles Thatcher, who knows how to work a feather-bedecked lavender velvet costume).
Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson’s staging from 2003 was created in collaboration with Bolshoi-trained Yuri Possokhov, who knew the 1900 Alexander Gorsky production, which added new dances and interpolated bits of music to the original 1869 ballet by Marius Petipa. So this is not a purist’s work of art, and the main score by Ludwig Minkus is hardly Tchaikovsky. But it surely is fun theater, with a phalanx of toreadors who rush around spinning capes and stabbing knives into the floor for excellently playful ballerinas like Sarah Van Patten (superb on opening night) to tiptoe around. Martin Pakledinaz’s costumes, commissioned in 2012, add to the zing with sherbet hues and Technicolor combinations, such as turquoise against orange for those toreadors’ tights.
Tomasson has said he wanted to bring back “Don Quixote” for his final season at the company’s helm because he has so much talent in his ranks to showcase now. That was a good call. Talent was sparking all over the stage Saturday, from the stylish precision of the 19 corps women in the Act II dream scene, to Norika Matsuyama’s crisp cupid and Sasha Mukhamedov’s stately Queen of the Driads. Ellen Rose Hummel was the most passionate gypsy woman I’ve ever seen. As Kitri’s friends, Julia Rowe and Isabella DeVivo not only oiled the plot’s gears, but got in some impressive traveling hops on pointe.
The earnest applause from fans Saturday feels connected to our moment. In 1944, when a wave of appreciation for ballet was sweeping across the U.S., critic Edwin Denby observed that audiences “seem to enjoy the cordial gaiety, the civilized tone a first-rate ballet evening can be counted on to have. Perhaps such qualities are valued more in times like these, when the sustaining warmth of the world of poetry rises in contrast to the vicious ruin of war.”
Perhaps that is all true again.
San Francisco Ballet’s “Don Quixote”:Through March 6. $29-$448. War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-865-2000.www.sfballet.org