On the other hand, Whipped Cream is essentially eye candy. Ratmansky rightly doesn’t try to make the ballet more than what it ever was: an indulgent distraction from the hard times of post–World War I Vienna. Actual children in the cupcake costumes adds a drizzle of treacle. The ballet is indeed as fluffy as Schlag, comprising high-concept characters in spun-sugar divertissements – it’s the Land of the Sweets writ large, and veers close to being a children’s ballet.
(The drugs must have been really good.) All ends well in Praline’s pink principality, where an animatronic bee surveys gleeful dancing and the crowning of the Boy and Praline as the sweetest sweethearts in the land.
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Princess Praline (Sarah Lane) comes to the rescue, having recruited a baker’s dozen of fantastic beasts to spring the Boy from his gloom: the massively furry Snow Yak, Pink Yak and Long Neck Piggy, plus Parfait Man, magenta-bubble-clad Gumball Lady, the marvelous tail-flicking Worm Candy Man and a gaggle of Cupcake Children. The Doctor’s got some hallucinosis of his own, and envisions a slapstick battle of the sexes in which femme fatale Mademoiselle Marianne Chartreuse (Catherine Hurlin, costumed, oddly, as pink champagne) tames suitors Ladislav Slivovitz Vodka (Duncan Lyle) and Boris Wutki Plum Brandy (Roman Zhurbin).ĭaniil Simkin and Alexei Agoudine in Ratmansky’s Whipped Cream. A 16-woman corps tops off Act I with a whipped-cream waltz.Īct II finds the Boy in a fitful fever dream, thrashing in his hospital bed and subdued by a tippling doctor (Agoudine again) and a corps of nurses wielding giant hypodermic needles.
Marzipan Men, peppermint-stripe Sugar Plum Men and Gingerbread Men wage light warfare and make peace with the Coffee Guards and Tea Flower Attendants. Princess Tea Flower (Stella Abrera) is their queen, chased by a lothario Prince Coffee (David Hallberg, in his first US performance following a two-year injury hiatus), suave Prince Cocoa (Joseph Gorak) and overeager Don Zucchero (Blaine Hoven). Sarah Lane and Daniil Simkin in Ratmansky’s Whipped Cream.Īfter hours, the spirits of the Konditorei come out to play. The Chef (Alexei Agoudine) can’t keep the whipped cream away from the whisk-licking Boy, who gets toted out on a stretcher. The Boy (Daniil Simkin) and his friends have just received their First Communion, and how better to celebrate than with unbridled gluttony at Vienna’s finest pastry shop. American Ballet Theatre gave his creation its world premiere on Wednesday, March 15, at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa California, and what the audience got was a wafer-thin story heaped with decorative icing. Ratmansky wished to re-create the 1924 two-act story ballet Schlagobers, using the original libretto and score by Richard Strauss. The Boy in Alexei Ratmansky’s Whipped Cream wishes for unlimited sweets overfulfillment sends him to the hospital with sugar hallucinations.
(Click image for larger version)īe careful what you wish for. Alexei Agoudine, Duncan Lyle, Catherine Hurlin and Roman Zhurbin in Ratmansky’s Whipped Cream.