A buzzy, red-carpeted foyer stood ready for the premiere of the American Ballet Theatre’s rendition of The Winter’s Tale, a Shakespeare classic reimagined by Tony award-winning choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and hosted at the Trump-Kennedy Center.
The Winter’s Tale is a renowned Shakespearean romance from the early 1600s that blends tragedy and comedy, centering on King Leontes of Sicilia, whose irrational, unfounded jealousy destroys his family, leading to the death of his son and abandonment of his daughter, Perdita. Years later, through redemption and true magic, the family is reunited, and the king’s wife, Hermione, is miraculously restored.
Roma Daravi, the vice president of public relations at the Trump-Kennedy and a former ballerina, gave a glimpse into her interpersonal relationship with some of the dancers.
“I have seen some of these dancers many, many times throughout my entire life growing up training with them and dancing with them and watching them in their own shows so I’m really looking forward to seeing The Winter’s Tale. It’s going to be a beautiful love story full of drama as most ballets are but this will be a really unique one,” she told me before the show.
Theater-goers included Senior Advisor for the U.S. Agency for Global Media Kari Lake, who told me that she was excited for the show. “I don’t know what to expect tonight,” she said. “I was just telling somebody else that it’s kind of like going into a movie you want to see, and you don’t want to see the trailer for it, because you just want to go in and just be in awe.”
The American Ballet Theatre and the Trump-Kennedy Center delivered an awe-inspiring experience that can only be described as ethereal. Wheeldon successfully brought his vision to the stage of the Trump-Kennedy Center’s Opera House, where the performance perfectly articulated jealousy and redemption.
In the first act there was compelling choreography covering a wide spectrum of unraveling emotions. King Leontes of Sicilia has sudden, irrational, and intense jealousy after seeing King Polixenes of Bohemia dancing with his pregnant wife, Hermoine. The set and orchestra conveyed a darkness toward the end of the first act, building up to Perdita’s birth.
King Leontes’s jealousy forces Hermoine to give up her child to her handmaid, who ships off baby Perdita mirroring a Moses-like origin. A realistic storm created by projections, and set sheets combined with a damning score, delivered the feeling of desperation that Hermoine must have felt before falling dead from heartbreak.
In the second act, a world of light is born. Vibrant, blooming Bohemia boasts a heavily adorned tree of life at the foreground of the stage and the passage of time has turned Perdita into a spitting-image of her late mother. Perdita dons an amethyst color dress, standing out among her new gypsy kin. Amid a jig to a relatively cheerful score, she is adorned with the emerald necklace of her mother, that she traveled with as a babe. Love blossoms for the daughter of the king as she grows among the nomads she embraces as a pseudo-family. Perdita is free and perhaps possesses a freedom her mother longed for but never obtained under King Leontes. Perdita’s life is whimsical as she pirouettes around stage and embraces her lover in synchronicity — that is, until her father finds her and captures the gypsy tribe.
In the third act Perdita faces her father, and her father is forced to come to terms with the sins of his past. He allows his daughter and her lover to marry in a scene that can only be described as a Grecian painting come to life. Her father, the king, among the celebration realizes that his penance can only be atoned for by loving his daughter.
In the last scene Hermione is resurrected and dances with King Leontes; the cerebral beauty and fragility of love was evident in every movement of the final dance.
Complete with Bob Crowley’s lush, striking designs and Joby Talbot’s expressive, sweeping score, the cautionary tale ushered in the promise of hope and renewal.
Marisela Ramirez is the White House producer for Newsmax
