The names of several classic ballets tell you that the heroine is the most important character, but “Sylvia” is particularly imbalanced. In the version that Frederick Ashton created in 1952, once Sylvia arrives, she barely seems to leave the stage. The role, made for Margot Fonteyn, is a test of stamina and technique but maybe even more so of range. Each part of the story calls for a different attitude, differently expressed. One ballerina must be many.
At the Metropolitan Opera House last week, as American Ballet Theater performed Ashton’s ballet for the first time since 2016, four ballerinas took up the challenge, making their debuts as Sylvia. There’s more to the production than the lead role: Léo Delibes’ 1876 score, one of best from the 19th century; the many felicities of Ashton’s choreography, sweet, silly and intricate at every scale. But the performance of Sylvia is the focus.
“Sylvia” has one of those flimsy conventional story-ballet plots that’s mostly just a scaffolding for dance. A chaste nymph devoted to Diana, goddess of the hunt, Sylvia doesn’t just spurn the affection of the shepherd Aminta; she kills him with an arrow. Then Eros, the god of love, strikes her with his arrow, making her moon over Aminta, whom the god revives. But Sylvia is captured by a dumb villain and must escape his Orientalist cave by distracting him with a hoochie-coochie dance and getting him drunk. Rescued deus-ex-machina style by Eros in a boat, she is reunited with Aminta in a big classical celebration.
Intentionally old-fashioned in 1952, it’s less a love story than a story about Love. The brutish approach of the hunter fails; the delicacy of a pas de deux wins. It’s a nice change that the heroine doesn’t wait around for her beau or get betrayed by him — in a reversal of “Sleeping Beauty,” the woman has a vision of the man she must find. But an upshot is that the hero is ineffectual, close to a place holder. Dramatically, Sylvia carries the show.
On a technical level, there wasn’t a lot to distinguish the four debuting Sylvias. They all got through it admirably. The differences were subtle, and the similarities were related to a general shortcoming: Demonstrations of range were on the narrow side.
Maybe it was the pressure of going first, but Catherine Hurlin was surprisingly careful for someone nicknamed Hurricane. In her opening martial scene, leading attendants who stretch like the bows they wield and use their legs and feet like arrows, her dancing had an interesting, angry edge. Yet she was a cautious flirt, and her final tutu-and-tiara persona, while impeccably danced and loosened a little by love, wasn’t a dramatic transformation.
Christine Shevchenko brought a clarion tone to the warrior section, was a sunny seductress and found some play in the Act III hop-on-pointe pizzicato solo. Of the four, she was most sensual in the pas de deux, melting backward into her Aminta after he touches her on the temple — a crucial Ashtonian moment of warmth amid classical decorum. But all this was also too much on one level, too flat dynamically.
The best all-rounder was Skylar Brandt. Her Sylvia had a nice pursed-lip cockiness that carried over into a soubrette quality for her showgirl routine in the cave. And her classical display had sparkle and bloom, though when she melted, it felt a bit fake.
Chloe Misseldine was the risk-taker. Soon after she arrived onstage, she threw her horn into the wings — as the other Sylvias had, but with greater oomph. This punchy, all-out quality continued, even to the edge of wobbliness. She pushed a stuttering step that expresses Sylvia’s love-wounded vulnerability to the point of awkwardness. She wasn’t bolder in the sexy parts, but she was clearly having fun. Her classical mode was both sprightly and radiant, yet her melting was going-through-the-motions.
Misseldine’s performance was the most engrossing, if the most uneven. Sometimes she fell behind the music, misaligning crisp shifts of position that match end-stopped phrases in the score. But searching for stronger shading without seeming forced, she suggested in spots what a full-spectrum Sylvia might look like.
None of the Amintas quite escaped the dullness of the role. Calvin Royal III was elegant and joyful, but listless. Reece Clarke, a Disney-prince-type guest from the Royal Ballet, was musical, but his bounding jump sacrificed his upper body. Jake Roxander, equaling or surpassing the best formal qualities of the others, brought a boyish innocence to the part that almost made you care if he got the girl.
As much as Sylvia dominates the ballet, it is packed with smaller roles — naiads, dryads, peasants, gods and goats — that show off the full company. Seeing the work four times in four days, I found myself looking forward to a moment in Act III before Sylvia enters. The corps de ballet breaks into an anticipation-building skipping step, waving their hands in the air and shuffling rows. Soon after comes a beautiful barcarole, with saxophone, that heralds the arrival of Eros’s boat. Sylvia’s huntresses, now classicized, disembark in canon form, resembling the shades in “La Bayadère.”
Even with a Sylvia who isn’t ideal, “Sylvia” can be wonderful.
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