At last, the curtain rose on Matthew Bourne's "Swan Lake" here in Japan on Feb. 25, eight years after the production premiered at the famed Sadler's Wells Theatre in North London. The show was a sensation from the moment it opened, quickly transferring to London's West End, then crossing over to New York where it fascinated Broadway audiences and garnered Tony Awards for best director and best choreography for Bourne.
I myself remember that transfer to the West End in 1996; posters featuring the all-male corps de ballet of swans were all over Tube stations, and everyone seemed to be talking about Bourne and "Swan Lake." At the Piccadilly Theatre, where it played, there were long queues for standby tickets day after day. During the interval, audience members spilled out of the theater's small lobby into the streets, drinks in hand, talking animatedly and sometimes even drawing passersby into their conversations.
After so long a wait for such an acclaimed production, it's not surprising that the media here latched on to this "Swan Lake" as a big event. Mostly, though, it's been presented as merely a male version of the classic ballet or -- even more incorrectly -- as a "gay" version of "Swan Lake," presumably because of all those half-naked male birds. What few commentators have highlighted is that this "Swan Lake" from AMP (Bourne's company, Adventures in Motion Pictures) is a radical reinterpretation of the classic ballet set to Tchaikovsky's music, not just a version with male, instead of female, dancers.