American Ballet Theatre: Crime and Punishment punishes the audience (2024)

Great novels make bad ballets. There might be exceptions to this rule, but I can’t think of one. Okay maybe there is one: Petipa/Gorsky’s Don Quixote, but that ballet has almost nothing to do with Cervantes’ novel. George Balanchine attempted a more faithful version of Don Quixote but mothballed his own ballet eventually. It has never returned to the repertoire.

Novels are interior and often episodic. Ballets are exterior and focus on a few key events. Novels often rely on clever use of words and penetrating psychological insight. Ballets are non-verbal. Operas and plays can adapt some of that wordplay to the stage, ballets cannot.

It was therefore with some trepidation that I approached Helen Pickett’s Crime and Punishmentfor American Ballet Theatre.Dostoevsky’s novel is almost completely an internal character study about one man’s guilt following a murder. It is also a typical sprawling Russian novel with a huge character list and complicated relationships between characters. Remember the dictum “there are no mother-in-laws in ballet”? Russian novels are full of mother-in-laws.

There was almost nothing to enjoy about Crime and Punishment. I knew we were in trouble when the synopsis took up two pages of a rather large, 8.5x11 playbill. Each act was split into 10 different scenes. I thought there was no way for the audience to keep up with the story, and I was right. It was incredibly hard to understand what was happening onstage without constantly glancing at the program synopsis.

An excerpt from the synopsis:

“Raskolnikov returns home to find his mother Pulcheria, his sister Dunya, and her fiancé Luzhin waiting for him. His family is impoverished, and Dunya’s solution is marriage. Raskolnikov is disgusted by Luzhin, a boorish snob. Tensions escalate, and he accuses Dunya of prostituting herself by agreeing to marry Luzhin.”

Can tendus and arabesques really convey any of that?

This would be forgivable if there was any choreography of interest. But Pickett’s choreography is repetitive and ineffective. Raskolnikov’s guilt and rage is characterized by arm flailing and torso hunching. When things get REALLY tense, there’s a manège of piqué turns. The corps work is similar. Flailing arms, hunched torsos. Sometimes characters shake their fists for more angst.

The episodic nature of the ballet meant that there were several moments where you would never have understood why something happened if you weren’t already familiar with the novel. For instance, the entire plot with Sonya’s parents seems superfluous. They’re onstage, and they die. In the novel, Sonya’s home situation is necessary to know about because it explains why she desperately prostitutes herself despite being so religious. In this ballet, it was: who are they again and why should we care?

The production is also visually unappealing. There were projections and supertitles on a scrim that tried to give audiences an idea of what was happening onstage. A video of the murder of the pawnbroker is super-imposed on the screen several times, in case you missed this detail the first time. But two plywood walls wheel around repeatedly to mark scene changes. I did enjoy the music by Isobel Waller-Bridge. It sounded like movie music, but high quality movie music. However, the music tends towards short melodic fragments. Dance music needs a certain expansiveness so the choreography can grow and breathe.

The ballet wastes the talents of an excellent cast. Cassandra Trenary in the central role of Raskolnikov is given a punishing task of constantly dancing with no actual highlights. She flailed her arms mightily, but you would never know from watching her as Raskolnikov that she’s usually a penetrating stage actress. The gender-neutral casting of Raskolnikov was less subversive than anticipated, because of the sheer repetitiveness of the choreography. SunMi Park as the love interest Sonya is also given absolutely nothing to do other than to look pretty.

Calvin Royal III and Christine Shevchenko fared better. Late in the second act, there is finally a moment that ended up being the highlight of the evening. The music to the love duet between Royal and Shevchenko finally had a certain lush romanticism. Were the steps anything special? No, it was a lot of pairs-skating-inspired lifts. But at least it finally looked like dancing.

I did have fun watching James Whiteside act the mustache-twirling villain Svidrigailov, Dunya’s creepy, predatory employer.

I always root for new works to be successes. I don’t want ballet companies to only do Swan Lake and Nutcracker. But Crime and Punishment seems destined to be a “one and done” sort of ballet. There is nothing interesting or appealing about it. It is simply a huge punishment to audiences.

**111