Soggy Spectacular

During intermission at the Metropolitan Opera House last week, a man badly in need of a breather approached an attendant at an exit. "When," he asked, "will the next orgy begin?" He hardly had time to wait for an answer. The orgy began almost immediately, went on interminably, and inflicted on spectators perhaps the most tasteless evening ever endured at the Met. The occasion was the U.S. premiere of the Bolshoi Ballet's Spartacus, an extravaganza so preposterous it was hard to believe a professional dance company was responsible for it. The story dealt with Rome's slave revolt, as reported by Appian and Plutarch, and ended with the death of the slaves' leader, the gladiator Spartacus (once referred to by Karl Marx as "the most splendid fellow in all ancient history"). The choreography was by the Kirov Ballet's Leonid Yakobson, the music by Stalin Prizewinner Aram Khatchaturian, the role of the heroine danced by the Bolshoi's gifted Maya Plisetskaya. But the collaboration only underlined the Bolshoi's greatest weakness: an inability to respond to the fresh dance ideas that have swept so forcefully through Europe and the U.S.

Spartacus was meant to be the Bolshoi's answer to critics who accused the dance group of being hidebound traditionalists.

Although it provoked some controversies when it was introduced in an earlier version in 1958, it gave Moscow audiences an unexpected glimpse of a gamy world and eventually proved to be the most successful and talked-about ballet the Bolshoi had introduced in a decade. But in Manhattan it looked more like an elephant preserved under glass.

Spartacus, in fact, was more pantomime than dance--and silent-screen pantomime at that. From the first sledgehammer chord, accompanied by the projection of Rome's Colosseum on the scrim curtain, spectators might well have guessed that they were in for triumphal processions, slave girls, gladiators and courtesans, eye-rolling, tooth-gnashing and a dose of belly dancing. By Scene 2 of Act I, 16 corpses were sprawled about the stage.

By the final curtain, the count had risen by another 77 corpses, with a crucifixion or two thrown in. A feast at the Villa of Crassus provided an excuse for a seduction scene (by Ballerina Natalia Ryzhenko) and some writhing by 15 Cadiz dancing girls, all of them bare considerably south of the navel. Khatchaturian's thunderous score omitted scarcely a single cliche of film music, and not even Plisetskaya was equal to the absurdities of her role as Spartacus' wife. As Spartacus himself, the Bolshoi introduced a giant (Dmitry Begak) who danced just about the way a giant might be expected to.

All in all, a sad night for a renowned company.

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