As story ballets go, Frankenstein has a lot of it — story, that is. San Francisco Ballet’s production, which opened on Thursday, March 20, and runs through March 26 (with encore dates to follow), has an abundance of other things as well, including set changes, flashbacks, pirouette-driven corps dances, a cinematically supercharged score, and special effects. Whether or how it all comes together in a coherent and compelling way is the telling, problematic issue.
Based on Mary Shelley’s 1818 Gothic novel that has been rebranded by everyone from Boris Karloff to Mel Brooks, the ballet retells the story of a scientist who creates a humanoid (the Creature) that proceeds to wreak vengeance on Victor Frankenstein and his loved ones. The novelist herself signaled the mythical and moral implications of her tale by appending a second title: The Modern Prometheus, invoking the Greek Titan who was punished in eternity for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans. It’s no mystery why the story has remained so durable. While Shelley couldn’t have envisioned AI, her cautionary narrative about hubris and possibly heedless technological invention remains all too current.
A co-production with The Royal Ballet and first seen at the War Memorial Opera House in 2017, SF Ballet’s Frankenstein retains the novel’s 18th-century milieu in the set and costume design by John Macfarlane. Frankenstein (danced by Joseph Walsh on opening night) is an Enlightenment figure, albeit a weird and obsessive one, committed to learning and knowledge wherever it leads.
In a long first act that devotes too much stage time to what is essentially exposition, the early scenes depict the Frankenstein family at home. Victor has a slow-moving infatuation with the adopted orphan Elizabeth (Frances Chung). Both are doubled by younger versions of themselves. In the first of multiple corps dances, the ensemble portrays a household staff idly twirling about.
Following a short funeral for Victor’s mother, he’s off to university to develop his soon-to-be-fatal invention. Choreographer Liam Scarlett interjects two more corps scenes that come off as superfluous stand-alone set pieces. One takes place in the surgical theater and the other in a tavern. Lowell Liebermann’s hardworking, sometimes overheated music, played by the SF Ballet Orchestra under Martin West’s baton, can’t compensate for the boisterous but inert choreography.
Finally, with strobes and lightning spears, sonic blasts and plenty of sound and fury from the pit, the Creature (Wei Wang) comes creaking to life and promptly flees. Scarlett, who knows how to end an act, brings down the curtain on a science-fiction cliffhanger.
Frankenstein finds its dramatic voice and footing in its strong middle act. Walsh’s somewhat monochromatic performance up to now took on more texture and dimension, with his character haunted by dreams of what he’s wrought. The developments continue in Victor’s connection to Elizabeth, tenderly realized by Chung, her character seeming vulnerable even when taking flight with her fiancé in their pas de deux.
Soon enough the Creature lurks in a bare-limbed forest near the Frankenstein manor house. Clad in an ash-white bodysuit with prominent sutures across his physique and bare skull, Wang had a striking passage alone, grabbing and slapping at himself in the agony of his half-personhood. Vivid as it was, the solo made this viewer wish the ballet had captured more of the Creature’s twisted evolution, of his humanoid humanity. By the time he appears, he’s already a demonic force of vengeance.
The scene that leads to the Creature’s first murder — of Victor’s brother, William (the charming and self-assured young Bode Jay Nanola) — unfolds gracefully, proceeding from a game of blind man’s bluff that goes terribly wrong. When the Creature succeeds in pinning the killing on William’s nurse, Justine (Isabella DeVivo), a crowd of partygoers turns into a lynch mob, tossing her about like a rag doll. It’s a fine, resonant depiction of mob justice. Victor and the Creature grapple for their own verdicts in a muscular duet.
The last act, played as an extended, sometimes woozy waltz party, leads to a heavy body count. The Creature, curiously unnoticed by the other guests, is hard to miss in his body-baring bright-red coat. Also hard to miss: the gun that’s sure to go off.
For all its high-impact moments, Frankenstein is elusive, fragmented, and less than satisfying as a whole. Its storytelling and choreography can be both balky and blunt, the ballet’s component parts roughly stitched together, like the Creature’s limbs. It’s largely when the production comes heaving to life in the second act that the most vital invention takes hold.
