Just before the lights dimmed and the Lyric Opera Orchestra signaled that the show was about to begin, two glamorous older women beside me kept repeating to each other, “We are blessed.” The characters in Frankenstein are not so lucky.
In this Joffrey Ballet production, the story is condensed into three acts that use tension and music to continuously juxtapose the joy in the Frankenstein family’s life with the murderous fiend lurking in the background. It’s a theme that is presaged in the first scene, when Victor’s mother dies in childbirth. So it is with grief that Victor (José Pablo Castro Cuevas) departs for med school, glancing frequently at his mother’s portrait in a locket as he starts to conceive of revivifying a corpse.
Frankenstein
Through 10/22: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Upper Wacker Dr., 312-386-8905, joffrey.org, $36-$205
The mad scientist scenes are some of the most spectacular in the show—thanks to staging by Kristen McGarrity, Laura Morera, Lauren Strongin, and Joseph Walsh, and steampunk pyrotechnic wizardry. As Victor dances frenziedly around the classroom, light bulbs literally go off in the background, with lightning projected onto the walls. The fiend (danced in this production by Jonathan Dole), nude but for his gruesome stitches, comes to life, panics, and flees. It’s all downhill from here.
Missing in this rendition is much of the exposition of the monster’s MO. His first murder, of Victor’s younger brother, is mostly an accident. But the audience doesn’t see him pleading with Victor for a companion of his own, to quell the loneliness of life as an other, and Victor’s ultimate refusal. Instead, we get Victor’s magnificent wedding scene (to Elizabeth, danced remarkably by Amanda Assucena), with dancers in sparkly tulle skirts twirled aloft like so many feathery birds. As the guests celebrate in dance, Victor keeps having hallucinations (or are they?) of his late brother, and of the monster. As the man and his otherworldly creation fight their final tragic battle—Victor’s father, best friend, and bride already dead—the lighting in the painterly background subtly changes. It’s as if the sun were rising, or a fire burning, a subtle nod to Mary Shelley’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus.
Hanging over the show is the specter of Liam Scarlett, who choreographed this interpretation of Shelley’s iconic book. A ballet wunderkind—the first-ever artist-in-residence at the Royal Ballet—Frankenstein was his first full-length work. Scarlett took his own life in 2021, at age 35, following accusations of sexual misconduct “involving students at the Royal Ballet School.” Despite the company’s statement following a seven-month investigation that “there were no matters to pursue in relation to alleged contact with students of the Royal Ballet School,” the company cut ties with Scarlett in March 2020. There were also allegations of misconduct at the Royal Danish Ballet, which announced it was canceling a production of Frankenstein the day of his death. Like his monster, Scarlett’s legacy includes the untold pain of the harms that he may have committed—the void in the ballet echoing that left by Scarlett’s final act, where there can be no closure or justice, just tragedy.
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