Hi,

i wondered if any one saw The Stuttgart Ballet perform Taming of the Shrew at Opera Garnier in Paris recently.
Would be nice to hear some of your thoughts about it!

Thanks!

I haven't seen it, but what I heard about it was not very good. People said the music was very bad, and they didn't very much appreciate the ballet ...

If you want to do a research on the net, the french title of this ballet is La Mégère apprivoisée.

I'm sorry, but it was on the contrary a success. I saw this ballet three times, and everytime it was sold out, the people enjoyed very much the show and the dancers were acclaimed.
Perhaps some people didn't like it, but most of the audience did ; there were also good reviews in newpapers.

As far as I am concerned, I really enjoyed Cranko's The Taming of the Shrew, but probably not enough to attend another performance. An interesting artistic curiosity, I would say, lovely sets and costumes, and the discovering of a fabulous Petrucchio, Filip Barankiewicz!
Apart from that, we can't pass over the terrible Kurt Heinz Stolze (after Scarlatti) musical arrangements in silence... Such a musical score appears to be a real problem.
I may not speak for the others, but around me (about ten people I talked with), people were divided. Considering the nature of Cranko's choreography (a mixture of dance and pantomime), it's not so surprising as this style of dance is very unusual to us. I leave out these cultural considerations, - just mentioning that this style is also rather unique in ballet -, to emphasize the fact that drama action (and more specifically comedy in this case) does not always work perfectly. Undoubtedly, it has not the freshness and naturalness of Bournonville pantomime (sorry for anachronistic comparison).
Nevertheless, though not ecstatic, audience response was very positive when I was there (Paris Opera audience has rarely reactions of rejection), but unfortunately there were very few reviews in french newspapers about it (we're expecting them! ).

I would imagine that the last thing one might wish to hear, on adapting a spoken play to the ballet, is

"Nice, in a way, but a comic-strip compared to the original".

Cranko's "adaptation" of The Taming of the Shrew, reduces a fairly complex play (what IS, I ask, the moral of this particular tale? ) to a comic strip.

The characters are ludicrous, mere ciphers bearing only the faintest of relation to the original, while many scenes are outright grotesque - and as a Jew, allow me to say that I don't find people crawling about under the robe of a Catholic monk especially amusing, or flipping him upside down and shewing his bum to the public. It makes one neither laugh, nor smile.

Anyvey, as we might have said had that word existed in Yiddish, I've just read in The Telegraph about a new production of "The Shrew" at the Old Vic, that takes the opposite tack to the received interpretation. Petrucchio is portrayed as a right bastard, for starters. Now, that can be defended, given the ambiguity in the original.

What can not be defended is treating Will S. like a blob of vanilla ice, onto which you pour a sticky, sugary and lumpy travesty of a chocolate sauce.

In general, men, Will S is an author to beware of. He runs a tight ship, and although there may be room on deck to dance an Irish Jig, otherwise one would be well-advised not to disregard his orders.

You don't necessarily want that in the ballet.

Classical dance, when narrative, needs the simplest of story lines, so that we avoid people scurrying about like a chicken without a head, rolling their eyes, gesticulating and frowning.

That is why ancient Greek plays would be well-suited to the dance: not too many words, and wide open spaces for imagining.

Adieu,

The Untamed Shrew

(that rhymes, sort of, in English)

...and yet I am willing to bet that in ''Will S'''s day you would have been equally disgruntled....

Vanilla icecream tastes better with chocolate sauce.

p.s. if you wish to get some sort of a valid point accross, try using examples.

All the best.