Grande dame Boston Ballet makes Lady of the Camellias worth the price BY JEFFREY GANTZ

Val Caniparoli’s Lady of the Camellias has a lot in common with the courtesan of its title. Both the ballet and the bonbon are promiscuous creatures with checkered pasts. And both seem brittle, tart, and superficial when you first meet them but improve on further acquaintance. Lady of the Camellias is a skeletal work, its plot underdeveloped and sometimes obscure, its minor characters ciphers, its mostly undemanding choreography owing more to pair skating and gymnastics than to classical ballet. But it has a pumping heart and a strong backbone and unconsumptive lungs, and the right dancers can flesh it out. Staging this work for the first time last weekend, Boston Ballet took a performance or two to warm up to it, but by the time the production returns April 1, it’ll be worthy of many customers, even at Paris-courtesan prices.

To describe Lady’s past as checkered might be an understatement. The piece was commissioned back in 1990 by Ballet Florida from the choreographer/costumer team of Norbert Vesak and Robert Glay de La Rose. They had conceived Lady of the Camellias and arranged the score from music for piano and orchestra by Frédéric Chopin before Vesak died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. De La Rose asked San Francisco Ballet dancer and choreographer Val Caniparoli to complete the project, working with a libretto, music, and sets and costumes that weren’t his own. The libretto, moreover, is another lady of doubtful virtue. Alexandre Dumas fils wrote his 1848 novel La dame aux camélias in the wake of his 11-month affair with the celebrated courtesan Marie Duplessis, who had died of tuberculosis in February 1847. Insofar as Armand Duval isn’t nearly rich enough to be Marguerite Gauthier’s exclusive lover, the novel follows the real-life path of Alexandre and Marie, but whereas a frustrated and jealous Alexandre broke off the relationship, Armand and Marguerite drift into a Manon Lescaut–like idyll that’s undone by Armand’s father out of an implausible concern for his son’s reputation (the real Dumas père, author of Les trois mousquetaires and L’homme au masque de fer, had Alexandre out of wedlock with a seamstress and eventually married an actress). In 1852, Dumas fils made La dame aux camélias into a fabulously successful play that spawned, among other notable offspring, Giuseppe Verdi’s 1853 opera La traviata and George Cukor’s 1937 film Camille with Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor.

But the novel, its subject matter society and money and its romance all verbal sparring, is short on dramatic incident and doesn’t translate well to the stage, as witness Marguerite and Armand, Sir Frederick Ashton’s half-hour version set to the Liszt Piano Sonata. Besides Marguerite and Armand and Armand’s father, Lady’s cast includes the Baron de Varville as "Armand’s rival," "roué" St. Gaudins and his mistress Olympe, "young lover" Gustave and his fiancée Nichette, "playboy" Gaston, two "suitors" to Marguerite, and Prudence, "a milliner & member of the demi-monde." Olympe, always looking to move up from St. Gaudins, functions as Marguerite’s courtesan rival; Prudence, a complex presence in the novel as Marguerite’s confidante, is reduced to broad comedy (in previous productions, the part has been danced by a man). The other roles have no distinguishing characteristics at all. And though departing from the novel by making Marguerite genuinely fond of the wealthy Baron (who at the outset seems to be her main and perhaps only lover) has the advantage of setting him up as Armand’s romantic rival, it renders the actions of Armand’s father even less comprehensible. There’s no clue as to who he is when he strides on stage in the second act (conversation overheard Friday between two not-unintelligent-looking men: "He was the girl’s father." "Oh, that went right by me."), or why he doesn’t want Armand to be with Marguerite and her respectable-seeming demi-monde. (You could, of course, check your program, but a ballet should be a dramatization of a story, not just an illustration, and in any case, the last scene of the synopsis provided by de La Rose appears to be describing an older, longer version of the ballet rather than the one taking place on the Wang stage.) The third-act duel between Armand and the Baron looks to have been lifted from John Cranko’s Onegin, and there’s no apparent logic to having Marguerite imagine first a duet for "Dream Armand" and "Dream Marguerite" (roles taken by other dancers) and then a duet for the real Armand and Marguerite.

The score is likewise problematic: drawn mostly from works Chopin wrote before he was 21, it’s pyrotechnic rather than dramatic. Set in Marguerite’s Paris apartment after an evening at the theater, act one segues awkwardly from the opening tutti of the E-minor Piano Concerto into the third-movement Rondo (what amounts to a 10-minute divertissement with no opportunity for characterization), then resumes with the concerto’s first-movement recapitulation (the drawing-room duet for Armand and Marguerite) and its entire slow movement (their bedroom duet). Act two, a summer garden party in the Parisian suburb of Auteuil, breaks off halfway through the Krakowiak rondo for the brilliant inner sections of the "Là ci darem la mano" Variations before the Baron enters to the Karol Kurpinski theme from the Fantasy on Polish Airs. That work’s Introduction and Air are the affecting backdrop for the duet between Marguerite and Armand’s father; the "Là ci darem" Introduction and Adagio are the stirring backdrop for Armand’s act-ending soliloquy, after Marguerite has left, and there’s a witty segue as act three (set in the "ballroom" of Olympe’s apartment, which looks just like Marguerite’s) opens with the concluding Polonaise from "Là ci darem" before going on to the Grande Polonaise (the ballroom face-off between Armand and the Baron), the song "Nie ma czego trzeba"/"Nothing of What I Need" ("Dream Armand and Marguerite"), and, for solo piano, the Andante Spianato (Marguerite’s death scene).

Boston Ballet principal pianist Freda Locker had to perform this formidable pastiche five times in four days last weekend. I heard the first three performances, and though as of Saturday afternoon she was still smudging notes, she’s locating the emotional weight Chopin requires; the last pages of her Andante Spianato are excruciatingly slow and excruciatingly apt. Soprano Margaret O’Keefe brings a dark melancholy to "Nie ma czego trzeba" that makes Chopin sound like a major songwriter, a Polish Schubert. Caniparoli can’t have had an easy time choreographing this music; he does show he’s attuned to it by the way he matches characters’ appearances with thematic entrances, but though his partnering is challenging, there’s little about his individual steps that reveals either technique or character. David Gano’s sets for the outer acts look more like Versailles than a Parisian flat, with French doors that seem taller than the Arc de Triomphe; de La Rose’s act-two set, more Watteau than 19th century, boasts hanging flora (wisteria?) and swings. Chopin is supplemented by raindrops, chirping (but is that an American robin?), and cawing (crows, of course, sound the same on any continent).

No wonder that all this didn’t quite come together Thursday night. Larissa Ponomarenko’s Marguerite and Yury Yanowsky’s Armand seemed to be dancing in different ballets, Ponomarenko more like Onegin’s Tatiana, Yanowsky just looking for direction. Pollyana Ribeiro’s glittering Olympe didn’t fit the more somber turns of the music or the character; Pavel Gurevich’s Baron was authoritative but not individual; Romi Beppu’s Nichette was playful and supportive but one-dimensional. Christopher Budzynski, as Gustave, made everything look easy; he may have the cheerful countenance of a second banana, but he dances with the technique of a principal. The distinctive major figure was Roman Rykine’s Duval père: imperious, aristocratic, that long leg in back arabesque almost fascistic. Rykine joined Boston Ballet as a principal at the beginning of the 2002-2003 season but has been sidelined with an Achilles’ tendon injury till now; I wonder whether we’ll see him as Siegfried in May’s Swan Lake.

Friday, Sarah Lamb set the tone as an Olympe out to attract every man on stage (especially the ones with diamond necklaces in their pockets). Her very presence was a challenge to Lorna Feijóo’s Marguerite, and Feijóo responded with a Carmen-like courtesan who’s seen it all till she sees Nelson Madrigal’s Armand. He’s boyish but quietly commanding (the way in act two he keeps catching the ball with one hand), with torero elegance but also torero flexibility. Although they didn’t match Yanowsky and Ponomarenko for complexity of execution, this real-life husband and wife made the music seem balletic; Madrigal even found a flowing line in the stops and starts of Armand’s soliloquy. New company soloist (where was the announcement?) Mindaugas Bauzys, from Lithuania, was effective as a snobbish, patronizing Baron; Barbora Kohoutková brought more inner life to Nichette. Indelible moments began to develop: Joel Prouty’s suitor staggering back into the act-one drawing room after a quickie with Prudence (Donna Silva does what can be done with this underwritten role); Miao Zong’s Gaston executing an overhead smash that would do John MacEnroe credit as he exited to play tennis with Armand. And the generally bigger cast looked better in de La Rose’s sumptuous costumes and gave greater extension to the phrasing. But the revelation was Viktor Plotnikov’s Duval père, all concern and doubt where Rykine was unthinkingly self-assured, conveying nuance even when his back was turned, and executing the awkward, borrowed-from-Balanchine moment where Armand climbs into his father’s arms without conjuring Prodigal Son.

Saturday, Pavel Gurevich and Melanie Atkins lifted Armand and Marguerite to a similar level, Gurevich James Bond–like (he even looks like Pierce Brosnan) in his bearing and vulnerability, Atkins impulsive and spontaneous and more natural in her emotional affect than Ponomarenko or Feijóo, especially in her death scene. Rob Moore (think Simon Williams as James Bellamy in Upstairs, Downstairs) was an arrogant, spoiled young Baron spoiling for a fight; he and Gurevich brought out the nastiest in each other. Plotnikov was even more affecting with Atkins than he had been with Feijóo, two hearts breaking nobly in public. What’s more, he picked up the not-small Gurevich as easily as he had Madrigal. His performance made me forget about the music and the choreography and the staging; it’s what ballet is all about.