The American Ballet Theatre concluded its eight-week summer residency at the Metropolitan Opera House on July 20, presenting a repertoire that positioned narrative ballet as a living form of literary interpretation. Rather than treating classic texts as fixed monuments, the season's programming—spanning Shakespearean drama, Romantic tragedy, and fairy-tale allegory—examined how choreographic choices illuminate or complicate their source material.
Shakespeare at the Barre: The Tempest Returns
Twyla Tharp's full-length The Tempest (2013), revived for the first time since its critically divisive premiere, anchored the season's literary ambitions. The production, with sets by Santo Loquasto and costumes by Kasia Walicka-Maimone, eschewed literal island imagery for a palette of storm-grays and sudden golds—visual turbulence that matched Tharp's stylistic restlessness.
In the central role of Prospero, principal dancer Cory Stearns negotiated Tharp's idiosyncratic vocabulary—equal parts Balanchine speed and Broadway athleticism—with technical precision if not always dramatic authority. More compelling was Devon Teuscher as Ariel, whose suspended, off-balance sequences suggested genuine otherworldliness rather than mere technical display. The pas de deux between Miranda (Catherine Hurlin) and Ferdinand (Aran Bell) provided the evening's most coherent choreographic statement: Tharp condensed Shakespeare's courtship into continuous motion, eliminating mime in favor of partnering that literalized the lovers' discovery of equality.
The ballet's structural incoherence—Tharp's struggle to sustain dramatic momentum across three acts—remained unresolved. Yet as a document of ABT's willingness to revisit problematic commissions, the revival held institutional interest.
Petipa's Architecture: The Sleeping Beauty Reconsidered
Kevin McKenzie's staging of Marius Petipa's 1890 The Sleeping Beauty offered productive contrast: where Tharp's Tempest strained toward novelty, this production asserted the durability of classical syntax. McKenzie's revisions to the Petipa text—principally streamlined transitions in the Prologue and tightened narrative logic in Act II—served transparency rather than intervention.
The production's visual vocabulary, designed by Tony Walton (sets) and Willa Kim (costumes) for ABT's 2004 revival, retains its effectiveness: the Rose Adagio's spare garden setting focuses attention entirely on Aurora's technical trial, while the Act III apotheosis deploys gold leaf and ascending scrim with calculated theatricality.
Casting rotations revealed divergent interpretive approaches. On opening night, Hee Seo emphasized line and sustained balance in the Rose Adagio, accepting technical risk for architectural clarity. Later in the run, Isabella Boylston traded some spatial amplitude for quicker, more rhythmically alert footwork—an Aurora defined by musical responsiveness rather than pose. Both approaches found support in Ormsby Wilkins's conducting of the Tchaikovsky score, though tempi in the Vision Scene occasionally lagged, dissipating choreographic tension.
The Literary-Ballet Transaction
The season's implicit argument concerned adaptation itself. Swan Lake—presented in McKenzie's 2000 staging after Petipa and Lev Ivanov—demonstrated ballet's capacity to generate autonomous meaning from slender narrative premises; the literary "source" (various folk traditions, plus a libretto by Vladimir Begichev and Vasily Geltser) has long been superseded by choreographic tradition. Romeo and Juliet, in Kenneth MacMillan's 1965 version, represented the opposite extreme: Shakespeare's dramaturgy so thoroughly determines the ballet's structure that choreography functions primarily as illustration.
ABT's dancers navigated these distinct adaptation modes with variable success. In Romeo and Juliet, Christine Shevchenko's Juliet matured credibly from adolescent impulsivity to tragic consciousness, though her Act I spontaneity occasionally read as preparation rather than abandon. Calvin Royal III, promoted to principal in 2020, brought unexpected weight to Mercutio's death scene—transforming MacMillan's choreographic joke (the dying mock-ballet) into genuine pathos through timing that honored the music's ironic structure.
Institutional Context and Forward Motion
The 2024 summer season occurred during a transitional period for ABT. Executive director Janet Rollé, appointed in 2021, has emphasized repertoire diversification; the inclusion of Tharp's Tempest, however flawed, aligned with this priority. Yet the season's most fully realized achievements remained in the classical core—suggesting that ABT's institutional identity, despite administrative rhetoric, continues to derive from its Petipa heritage.
For audiences, the programming offered a usable education in ballet's literary relationships: not simple translation from page to stage, but complex negotiation between textual authority and choreographic invention. The Met's acoustical
