The biggest drama of American Ballet Theatre’s run of Onegins occurred offstage. Less than a week before the premiere, opening night leads Devon Teuscher and Daniel Camargo were abruptly pulled from the run after objections by Reid Anderson, the head of the Cranko Estate.
Teuscher and Camargo are excellent dancers, so what could the objections have been? Who knows. It was the kind of casual cruelty that unfortunately is all too common in the ballet world.
To be fair, Onegin is very cast dependent. A subpar cast will expose the thinness of the choreography and the shallowness of the ballet compared to Tchaikovsky’s famous opera. Onegin is anchored around several rather overwrought pas de deux, but the ensemble work is forgettable. The music is a piecemeal of Tchaikovsky works that does not have much cohesion.
My first experience with the ballet will probably never be equaled. I saw Diana Vishneva (Tatiana), Marcelo Gomes (Onegin), and Natalia Osipova (Olga). No cast has come close to their ability to carry the audience away in a whirlwind of drama and romance. I’m not sure how much of it was really Pushkin. I’m not even sure it was Cranko. But it was absolutely spellbinding. I still remember the anguish and yearning of Vishneva’s backbends, and the effortlessness with which Gomes performed of all the difficult lifts.
ABT has brought Onegin back into repertory to kick off its summer season. The cast I chose were making their debuts. Although Chloe Misseldine and Thomas Forster didn’t quite have the same heat as Vishneva and Gomes, they brought a lovely lyricism to the ballet.
Misseldine has had a meteoric rise through the ABT ranks. She only joined the ABT corps de ballet in 2021, and has already made her debut as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake. It is easy to see why. Misseldine is a gorgeous dancer. She has a shock of black hair, an expressive face with eyes that catch the light in the best way, and beautifully tapered legs and feet. Her arabesque is long, high and luscious. Despite her youth, her dancing has authority already.
Misseldine’s acting was on point as well. She was shy and demure in the first act, but one sensed an inner flame that burned brightly. Even more impressive was her ability to chart Tatiana’s growth through the ballet. The regal woman in the final act was a natural progression of who she was at the beginning of the evening.
Thomas Forster’s Onegin was a less natural fit. Forster is tall, handsome, with dark hair. He looks Byronic. But his stage persona and acting are humble and unassuming. The cruel arrogance of the character does not come naturally to Forster. When he ripped Tatiana’s letter and dumped the torn paper in her hands, it didn’t look natural.
With that being said, Forster is an incredibly strong partner who could handle the difficult overhead lifts of the mirror and final pas de deux, and in the famous final scene, Forster was convincingly heartbroken.
The partnership between Misseldine and Forster is a new one, and it showed at times. Some of the lifts in the bedroom mirror pas de deux looked a bit careful. That will grow with time. But they’re already an appealing Tatiana/Onegin pairing.
Olga and Lensky should be a nice foil for Tatiana and Onegin. In this performance, Catherine Hurlin (Olga) and Aran Bell (Lensky) were lovely and charming, although one senses that they will graduate to Tatiana and Onegin in a few years. Hurlin was less overtly immature than most Olgas. Bell has long, beautiful lines that made his adagio solo in Act 2 a highlight. Jarod Curley (Gremin) was kind and touching as Gremin. His pas de deux with Tatiana was sweet and actually full of quiet affection.
New Yorker critic Arlene Croce once dismissed John Cranko’s Onegin as “pop ballet”. If Onegin resembles anything in pop culture, it’s the Netflix show Bridgerton. The period costumes, the beautiful actors, the swooning romance. Just as Bridgerton is not great TV, Onegin is not a great ballet. But with the right dancers it is very enjoyable.
