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“SEE IT. Or live to regret it.”
Independent on Sunday
“A one-of-a-kind Broadway phenomenon.”
New York Times
“This SWAN LAKE should be seen far and wide.”
Variety
“A breathtaking leap of imagination.”
CBS TV
“One of the most enjoyable, provocative and starling evenings you can spend in the theater.”
Liz Smith, syndicated
“…fresh, funny, exciting and moving as ever.”
Oxford Times
“…probably the finest and most imaginative choreographer
working in popular theatre today.”
Birmingham Post
“…a glorious collaboration of talented artists…”
The Times
“…a classic in its own right and remains the best piece of dance theatre you’re ever likely to see…”
What’s On in London
PRESS QUOTES - 2004/2005
"Its stars were fabulous from the word go, but now everyone in the 39-member company performs with a polish that matches their commitment" Time Out
"Lez Brotherston's stunning set and costume designs remain one of this production's chief joys" Time Out
"Small wonder that Bourne's production continues to break virtually every box office record in sight." Time Out
"Hurrah for Matthew Bourne!...It's thrilling, chilling theatre" Evening Standard
"It's epic, tragic, personal and universal. Welcome back to this tremendous show." Daily Telegraph
"The production is a glorious collaboration of highly talented artists, not least of whom are the dancers" The Times
"Neil Westmoreland is outstanding as the increasingly deranged Prince" The Times
"This is one of the saddest Swan Lakes you will see, and one of the best" The Times
"A wonderful entertainment" The Guardian
"A must-see...blessed with a hugely energetic young cast, the male swan routines are a marvel, the punked-up make up and feathery leggings (courtesy of Lez Brotherston) perfectly capturing the mix of mishcief and menace that Bourne's choreography conjures up." Metro
"Tirado's technique is so assured that he looks utterly relaxed, which, in turn, makes his sudden swoops into menace all the more frightening." Bloomberg
"Bourne brings Tchaikovsky close to home, making modern sense of its mythical story.... newcomers will still be stunned by Bourne's savage compassion." The Observer
"When the talented Jason Piper exchanged his feathered Swan for the black-leather clad Stranger in the Royal Ballroom, he established an impressive presence." Sunday Express
"Tirado and his swans stormed through Bourne's dances with all the strength and beauty of the wild creatures they represent. The power of Bourne's Swan Lake lies with them and it survives undiminished." Sunday Telegraph
"Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake is still a must-see for the way it meets the music's majesty and pathos. Happily, Tchaikovsky gets a regal reading from the small orchestra under Brett Morris. At this rate expect another revival in 2014." Independent on Sunday
"Don't miss it" What's On
San Francisco Chronicle. 2006
Matthew Bourne’s ‘Swan Lake’ hatches a new vision of the ballet that was just waiting to take flight
By Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle March 24, 2006
Review: 5 out of 5 - “Wild Applause”
The Prince is having a very rough night. Slumped against a brick wall after a bout of
heavy drinking and brawling at the Swank Bar, he senses something rustling out there in
the dark. Wings, of all things -- swan wings. With that the scrim rises at the Orpheum
Theatre, and the roiling, repressed emotion of Matthew Bourne’s “Swan Lake” crests and
bursts forth in wave after wave of sinewy, thunderous dance.
For the next 20 minutes or so, the miserable Prince is swept away and saved, stunned by
the power of everything stirred up in him by this flock of stormy birds, especially one of
them. The audience gets swept along with him. By evening’s end it will have happened
again and again -- in a ballroom and a bedroom and most of all in the realm of fresh,
doomed love. Bourne’s savagely beautiful, saucily funny and deeply unsettling version of
the classic 19th century story ballet is a modern theatrical dance masterwork. The arrival
of this celebrated 1995 work here is a long-overdue event, and it’s feverish and sly and
heart-wrenchingly sad.
In roaming far from the original narrative, this “Swan Lake” also proves uncannily
faithful to its lyrical and romantically tragic source. Performed to the Tchaikovsky score,
the production turns every invention -- from its theme of homosexual awakening and an
all-male corps of bare-chested swans to its cell-phone gags and cheeky use of disco,
tango and ballet parody -- to a focused sense of purpose. The audience, whether it knows
the classic Petipa-Ivanov ballet or not, comes away with a new “Swan Lake” indelibly
minted in the image of the old.
Don’t be misled by the show’s transgressive reputation. This isn’t a tart, boy-toy
burlesque. Nor is it some agenda-driven dance manifesto. It’s a serious, psychosexually
probing vision, a brilliant reimagining that goes to the universal core of this tale of love
and transformation. Even in a somewhat compromised orchestration, Tchaikovsky’s
caressing, turbulent music is reborn in the process. The limber woodwinds, under musical
director Earl Stafford’s baton, shoulder the heroic load in the pit.
The story begins with the Prince in the throes of a bad dream, tossing and turning fitfully
as a nightmare swan looms over his enormous headboard. In Bourne’s scenario, the
Prince (danced by Neil Penlington in the production’s rotating casts, on opening night) is
a tentative young man locked down by stultifying luxury and his dauntingly cold mother,
the Queen (Saranne Curtin). Instead of a hunter who falls in love with a bewitched
woman-swan, as in the original, this Prince is a bored and frightened captive of his duties.
In a parody of contemporary English royalty, he waves listlessly at the crowds with his
mum and winces at receiving lines. He’s a sitting duck for some vamp (Leigh Daniels as
a Fergie parody) to come along and snare him.
Bourne, who is British, created a buzz with his topical House of Windsor references back
in ‘95. But much of the humor, like the Prince using the backs of his house staff as steps
or the delicious gender-bent ballet he attends, is timeless. Like Mark Morris (“The Hard
Nut”), Bourne has a flair for tightly packed and fast-moving visual wit.
By the time he’s fled to the Swank Bar and then to a park in his dark night of the soul, the
Prince is ripe for something deeper. It comes in the form of a great burly Swan (Alan
Vincent), who is at once menacing and seductive, powerful and beneficent. As a flock of
birds surges onto the stage in fluidly shifting configurations, the Prince sprints on and off
with a big new grin on his face. He’s found something precious in this swarm of male
flesh and feathered leggings: a sudden access to his own feelings.
Here the genius of this “Swan Lake” washes over the stage. In his choreography for the
swans, Bourne replaces ethereal female lightness with protean, muscular grace. Tucking
their winglike arms behind their backs, then unfurling them to mold and carve through
space, the swans are ever-changing marvels. They can be heavy and formidable,
stamping the floor and advancing downstage in wedge formations. Or they can softly bob
their heads, flex their spines and twine their necks together, always firmly masculine,
never fey. Their arms become bills and open mouths, tumescent long necks and beating
wings again.
This swan ecstasy flies right through intermission and into the show’s second part. There,
in the ballroom scene, Vincent returns as the Stranger, a louche, omnivorous invader in
black leather pants who paws at the women, eyes the men through narrowed eyes, tosses
back drinks and even turns the haughty Queen into a shameless dirty dancer. In one bit of
Freudian giddiness, she scissors open her legs as the Stranger whirls her past her
agonized son.
The whole scene is one propulsive, partner-changing dance, ramped up to a telling climax
-- complete with a stark film-noir lighting cue -- when the Prince and the Stranger
confront each other for a bristling pas de deux. It’s violent and tender, a kinetic exchange
of erotic power and acquiescence that both echoes the swan scene in the park and
prefigures the show’s final act. With mounting intensity, this “Swan Lake” soars into a
further dimension. Shadowy dream visions give way to the visceral pull of fate.
Swarming and pecking, invading and retreating and massing again, the swans are driven
by something beyond them -- by music and their nature, by the awful, irresistible seizure
of passion that grips the Prince and the Swan to the end.
The dancing in this “Swan Lake” is by no means balletically pure or even technically
polished all the time. That may trouble viewers who want to see their “Swan Lake”
through the lens of this one. But Bourne’s theatrical instincts guide and shape the drama
throughout. The performers writhe and whisper, sneer and preen. Dancing and acting are
potently fused. Lez Brotherston’s sets focus the action inside a taut frame of tilted castle
walls and pillars. His costumes run a heady gamut from shaggy swan pants to haute
couture send-ups.
Vincent, seen here in Bourne’s “Car Man” at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall in 2001, made
the Swan bravely and transfixingly human and brought an animal brutality to the role of
the Stranger at Wednesday’s opening. Penlington turned his tremulous, sulky Prince
inside out, laying bare every dream and terror. Curtin was a cool and lethally selfish
Queen.
Bourne’s “Swan Lake” doesn’t mock or deconstruct anything. It takes a ballet classic and
refashions it in vivid theatrical terms, finding a new coherence that is at once blazingly
original and serenely self-assured. Bourne finds an entirely new “Swan Lake,” you feel at
the end, that was just waiting to be discovered.
Variety. 2006
Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake
By Steven Oxman, Variety March 10, 2006
Unlike most choreographers, Matthew Bourne really wants you to see his dancers sweat.
His version of “Swan Lake,” now on its 10th-anniversary tour and playing as a bonus
production at the Ahmanson, is not a dainty ballet, where slender, pretty ladies glide
across the stage on tippy toes with arms raised gracefully in the air (unless they’re doing
it for a laugh). This is a vital, vibrant, violent “Swan Lake,” where male swans stomp and
kick and might even eat their prey. This take on Tchaikovsky’s love story launched the
British Bourne as an international star and it remains his signature work, having lost none
of its emotional potency since it first came to Los Angeles in 1997.
Ahmanson auds have since seen quite a lot of Bourne’s work, including “The Car Man”
and “Play Without Words,” both of which are steeped in the popular culture of film.
Bourne also recently co-directed and choreographed a production of “Mary Poppins” that
will land on Broadway in the fall, and his version of “Edward Scissorhands” will arrive in
L.A. at the end of the year.
“Swan Lake” didn’t necessarily tip off audiences that Bourne was that much of a film
lover; this piece doesn’t put forward the same kind of direct homages to famous
cinematic sequences as his later work. But it does amply demonstrate his desire to drag
the form of ballet -- kicking and screaming, if necessary -- back into popular culture and
away from the purely rarefied.
Bourne is first and foremost a lively storyteller, and in addition to plenty of passion, he
brings a great deal of humor to “Swan Lake.” The opening scenes cleverly depict the
young prince learning to perform his ceremonial duties, practicing the royal wave while
trying not to seem bored to tears.
While his mother, the Queen (Oxana Panchenko), flirts with her citizens -- just the
slightest extra touch of the chest while pinning on the medal -- she lavishes not a hug on
her son. Once the Prince is grown up, or at least semi-grown -- Simon Wakefield, who
portrayed the Prince on opening night, has the perfect, cherubic look of a young man not
quite yet comfortable with adulthood -- is happy to accept the advances of an illmannered
but somehow innocent social climber (Leigh Daniels).
Bourne hits multilayered heights of humor with a scene where the three attend a ballet --
the tippy-toe, gracefully-raised-arms variety -- and our attention is torn between the
comic shenanigans both onstage and in their box, where the Girl Friend causes the Queen
fits with her stereotypically gauche behavior. When her cell phone goes off, it’s a
moment of genuinely inspired self-consciousness that also tells the audience quite clearly
how relatable Bourne intends this to be.
Of course, this is just introduction to the real star of the evening, the Swan (Alan
Vincent), who appears with his cohorts at the moment the Prince is ready to drown in a
lake.
The mesmerizing extended sequence involving the male ensemble, which brings the
Prince fully out of his adolescent haze and into a fuller sense of his sexual longing, stands
by itself as a significant choreographic achievement. The men, dressed in feathery
bottoms by designer Lez Brotherston and wearing nothing at all above the waist, infuse
the bird-like movement with a striking blend of grace and physical power.
The second act continues the narrative escalation, as Vincent reappears as the Stranger
and seduces the Queen, causing the Prince fits of confusion and jealousy.
The performers here are all quite extraordinary. Given his focus on the underlying
passions between the characters, Bourne’s work requires a deep connection between
performers -- call it chemistry, electricity or whatever. And the perfs in this production,
restaged by members of his company, capture that. The smallest glance or gesture
contains ripe emotional meaning; a darted eye toward the audience is filled with disdain;
a slap on the thigh serves as a warning.
The show hasn’t lost any of its edge in the last 10 years. Gay twists on famous tales can
wear off quickly once the novelty element has passed, but “Swan Lake” seems only to
have deepened.
What most stands out here as compared to a first viewing some nine years ago is not the
surprising vibrancy and sweaty eroticism of the movement, but the depth of the Prince’s
emotional agony.
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