by Leigh Witchel
You usually know what’s happening in Christopher Wheeldon’s story ballets. But you don’t always care. He’s moved away from doing shorter choreography in favor of large-scale narrative works, and “Like Water for Chocolate” is the latest of Wheeldon’s dansicals. Once again, he prioritized the plot, cramming the narrative in, at the expense of emotion and feeling. The result wasn’t satisfying either as a story or a ballet.
As with the others, he was working on a costly, Broadway scale, enough so that the expenses were shared in a co-production with The Royal Ballet, where the piece premiered a year ago, and American Ballet Theatre. A frequent collaborator, Joby Talbot, composed the music; both Wheeldon and Talbot were credited with the scenario derived from Laura Esquivel’s 1992 novel.
It told the story of Tita, the youngest daughter of Mama Elena. Tita’s love of Pedro was thwarted by a dreadful family tradition. “Like Water for Chocolate” resembled Wheeldon’s other works in the genre, “Alice in Wonderland,” “Cinderella,” and “A Winter’s Tale,” in ways both good and bad. It was heavily driven by effects as if it were obliged to deliver something blockbuster.
The evening started with an unfortunate filmed introduction, with both the original author Laura Esquivel and the musical consultant and conductor Alondra de la Parra obsequiously praising and thanking the production and Wheeldon for noticing Mexico and Mexican art. Surely there was a way to thank the producing members of a team without it sounding like paternalism.
The ballet dove quickly into the plot. Projections were used less to tell you where you were, and more to tell you when – at what point you were on the timeline. At the outset, though, the projection stated the crux of the conflict: that this household dictated that the youngest daughter remain unmarried to care for her parents until death.
Wheeldon was aiming for Broadway production values. Bob Crowley provided us with a line of women dressed, depending on which direction they faced, as brides or spinsters. It was striking, but the production was satisfied with leaving them as window dressing. They remained at the back for most of the act, knitting, without bothering to explore the possibilities. One of the other coup de théâtres was an enormous backdrop that looked as if it had been pieced together from lace tablecloths. Wouldn’t it have been amazing to have the spinsters “construct” it?
Instead, the ballet busied itself with stuff happening.
It’s hard to tell if there is a similarity in the two written works without having read them, but as ballets, “Like Water for Chocolate” bears more than a passing resemblance to Kenneth MacMillan’s treatment of Lorca’s play about another family of daughters stifled by their mother, “Las Hermanas.” The stifling is literal here, as Mama Elena cinched Tita into a corset.
The ballet moved with no less restriction. Wheeldon’s choreographic palette was angular and modern-ish, but his command of contemporary movement has never felt native. The contractions and flexed extremities seemed as if they were there to be not-ballet, not to help tell the story.
Wheeldon introduced the main protagonists racing about the kitchen, with plenty of blocking and business. At the opening, we met SunMi Park as Tita and Courtney Lavine as Nacha, the cook, stretching and kneading dough together. So much was going on that it wasn’t easy to notice the performers, though you saw flashes of Park’s gorgeous feet or Skylar Brandt’s strength. So much acting was needed and most of the cast felt as if they were swallowed on the Met stage.
Daniel Camargo is one of the company’s strongest actors, so a helpful choice for Tita’s love Pedro. He and Park met one another in a busy allegro. Wheeldon got one point across efficiently: a blue ribbon quickly showed how Pedro was forced into a marriage, not to Tita, but her sister Rosaura, played by Chloe Misseldine, something he neither expected or wanted.
But the action raced on to a scene for Tita and Nacha. That would have been a logical spot for a scene with Tita and Pedro. The challenge for the performers will be to find the moments in between the turns and the jumps and the lifts.
Mama Elena set Tita to work, but like a meaner version of “Cinderella” forced her to make Rosaura’s wedding cake. But aspects of Esquivel’s plot couldn’t be conveyed without words. Tita’s tears mixed with the cake batter to create sad memories of lost loves. Nacha tasted the batter, but she seemed more nauseous from food poisoning. It wasn’t clear that her lover’s ghost appeared. You would have had to read either the long synopsis or the novel.
Wheeldon has always understood the need for dance divertissements. For the wedding festivities, he layered the corps with three different contingents, young friends, older guests and family. The line of spinsters were suspended in their chairs above, knitting. At first standing away from the action, Park then danced an anguished solo, but that felt like a retread, something Wheeldon might have made for Lauren Cuthbertson in “A Winter’s Tale.”
Wheeldon did make the dance also a pas d’action as Pedro tried to escape to talk to Tita. She pushed him away, but he managed to let her know he still loved her. It was one of the times you felt something. If anyone could break through all the business, it was Camargo. The scene ended in a cascade of action – sickness, anger and death – that was difficult to follow unless you knew the story.
The action picked up “One Year Later.” Rosaura had given birth to a daughter; Pedro came to see Tita as she helped care for the child. When the lovers got to interact without having to do so much stuff, they came more to life. Tita cooked, and a shower of rose petals fell.
Skylar Brandt played Tita’s other sister Gertrudis, who danced with a crowd of men including Aran Bell, and a few women. The dancing degenerated into a big tango, coarse and Spanishy, where she was passed from man to man in a flesh-toned unitard. A horse was involved, and just about everything got mounted. Shades both of MacMillan’s “Manon” and of Boris Eifman.
Somehow, Pedro and Tita met after this, appropriately in a state of deshabille. They were caught by Mama Elena. The role, played by Claire Davison, was vivid and difficult to put over. Mama Elena was little more than a cuckoo clock of awful, coming out on schedule and ruining people’s lives.
In the midst of all of this, the fact that Rosaura and Pedro’s child died came and went, but Tita lost it and fought with Mama Elena. She slammed Tita to the ground, stepped over her and started to leave, yet hesitated. She brought Dr. John Brown, danced by Calvin Royal III, to tend to Tita, and his kindness quickly blossomed into love. He took the lace backdrop and wrapped it round Tita like a cape; they walked forward as the act ended.
Act Two picked up Four Years Later, with Tita and Dr. Brown at his home in Texas. Royal and Park danced a domestic bliss duet, and he was vivid from his first entry. But we ran into Balanchine’s Mother-In-Law dictum: Brown had an older child, and there was again no way without reading the novel or the synopsis to know that it was from a prior marriage.
At Mama Elena’s wake, Wheeldon finally combined storytelling and choreography. As Tita read Mama Elena’s diary, her corpse revived transformed to a young woman, and started dancing with a young man, her lover. We had been waiting for something that could only happen in a ballet. Elena’s brothers murdered her lover. If the chain of abuse was as simplistic as a telenovela, it was also clear and theatrical.
Like Camargo, Royal was able to break through the fog of steps and blocking, dancing a solo with a beautiful, liquid quality. If Camargo put his role over by acting, Royal accomplished the same by dancing and presence. He lay on the ground to beg Park to remain with him, but she sent him away.
Camargo entered in a state to find Tita, and he has the acting chops to make his passion clear and sympathetic. Like “Onegin,” the ballet needed their duet, and they made it look like something. He pulled off his shirt, then her top, but still managed to keep her breasts discreetly concealed. That’s evidently why there was an Intimacy Coach.
The scene changed to the Gypsy camp of “Don Quixote,” Act 2. Except the men were gauchos. Or revolutionaries. Or whatever lusty stereotype is needed to provide the dancing in Act 2 of a ballet. At least it gave Bell and Brandt an opportunity to dance, and to show that Gertrudis was happy in her marriage.
Tita visited for about a minute. Then Mama Elena came in as the Red Queen in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” where Wheeldon also used a literally outsized female antagonist. “Like Water for Chocolate” often felt like a patchwork of other ballets. Wheeldon also has a habit of scavenging his own ideas, which is why you shouldn’t see “Polyphonia” and “Continuum” on the same program. Nothing is new under the sun; everything has an predecessor. But if you notice them more than the work itself, it’s a problem.
If Tita was now free of Mama Elena’s malign influence, it came at a cost. Like a talisman, Tita showed her mother’s spirit the diary, but Pedro collapsed.
There was only about twenty minutes more in the ballet, which made the twenty minute intermission seem as if it were dragging things out, but we were now One Week Later. Pedro had not died, Tita was nursing him and she and Brown renewed their comradeship as loose ends got wrapped up. Rosaura died trying to perpetuate her misery on her own daughter with Pedro, Esperanza.
And after that short scene, it was Twenty Years Later.
It took Pedro two decades to gain a little padding and grow a mustache, but he and Tita attended the wedding of Esperanza and Dr. Brown’s son. The celebrants quickly left so that Pedro and Tita could dance the 11 o’clock number. In a flash, he was young again, wearing only tights and she was in a filmy shift.
He pressed her overhead, and behind them the brides assembled once more. The lace cloths descended and functioned as projection screens, showing flames as the lovers immolated airborne in an apotheosis brought to you by ZFX. It was a lot of effect, with surprisingly little emotion, and weirdly, didn’t feel like a conclusion.
That’s perhaps because the production missed the metaphor behind the effect. In the novel, Pedro didn’t propose to Tita until Esperanza’s wedding, because he doesn’t want to die without being her husband. Consummation and combustion were allied. Here, that wasn’t clear. Rosaura died onstage, and the implication was that Tita and Pedro immediately got together. Then we were told by the synopsis it was 20 years later and “the families are united in love and the tradition is broken.” Evidently, the team preferred a happy ending, but immolation isn’t the metaphor you’d think of for two decades of a happy marriage. Besides, the effect was better in “Logan’s Run.” At least folks exploded.
“Like Water for Chocolate” is a passionate story filled with magical events, but Wheeldon hasn’t shown himself to be the man to handle a fantastical story about overwhelming, destructive passion. He’s not a passionate nor a fanciful choreographer. He’s an ingenious and meticulous one. But the point of a ballet adaptation isn’t just to tell the plot. It’s to create something so suited to the medium that it could be nothing other than a ballet. And that’s eluded Wheeldon so far.
Well, at least he didn’t try to make a dansical out of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
copyright © 2023 by Leigh Witchel
“Like Water for Chocolate” – American Ballet Theatre
Metropolitan Opera House, New York, NY
June 23, 2023
Cover: Skylar Brandt in “Like Water for Chocolate.” Photo © Marty Sohl.
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