A $4M makeover awakens Pacific Northwest Ballet’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’

With its reimagined, much-anticipated new production of The Sleeping Beauty (Jan. 31 - Feb. 9), Pacific Northwest Ballet is hoping for something similar: a fairy-tale moment for an arts organization that has spent the past five years working to shake off the pandemic’s hex. 

A perennial crowd-pleaser, The Sleeping Beauty has been in PNB’s repertoire for decades. Several years ago, artistic director Peter Boal decided it was time to replace the traditional Western European version — along with the company's well-worn costumes — with something that might be more resonant with contemporary audiences.

He envisioned creating a visual fantasy, something like television’s Game of Thrones.

“If you think about Game of Thrones, its scenic elements, they’re really timeless and placeless, you’re not sure if it’s Mesopotamia or Byzantium,” he says. “And that’s what I wanted, a place that was mythical, where magic happens.”

This week, PNB will unveil Boal’s ambitious new take on The Sleeping Beauty, featuring costumes by Broadway and film designer Paul Tazewell plus a set designed by internationally renowned glass artist and Seattle resident Preston Singletary.

The world premiere staging also boasts a 21st-century reinterpretation of Marius Petipa’s original 19th-century choreography; a plot streamlined from four acts to two; and characters who more closely reflect the perspectives of contemporary audiences than those who watched the ballet’s 1890 premiere in St. Petersburg, Russia.

It’s been a massive undertaking, the biggest and most costly in PNB’s history. With a price tag of more than $4.3 million — for just 11 performances this year — it’s a risky gamble for a nonprofit arts organization still trying to stabilize its finances five years after the COVID pandemic.

Enthusiasm is high inside PNB’s Seattle Center home (“We’re all Sleeping Beauty all the time,” Boal says), but there’s no guarantee the money and time investments will pay off.

The last time PNB made such a big bet on a new production was in 2015, when it unveiled a new version of The Nutcracker. 

Boal replaced PNB’s long-running take on the Christmas classic (choreographed by former artistic director Kent Stowell in 1983) with a version created in 1954 by the late George Balanchine. He chose the older choreography in part because it was the Nutcracker he’d known as a child and later as a dancer with Balanchine’s company, the New York City Ballet. Boal also replaced long-beloved sets by Maurice Sendak with a new look by Ian Falconer.

Ticket sales were strong during the first season of the “new” Nutcracker, and company spokespeople say PNB likely recouped its investment — more than $3 million — that same year. Now, with 40+ performances every holiday season, Nutcracker is the company’s biggest moneymaker, providing almost 25% of PNB’s annual budget.

Nobody expects that same revenue from The Sleeping Beauty. It won’t get annual productions, and the productions that are scheduled will run only two weekends.

Nevertheless, Boal is optimistic, thanks to the strength of his collaborative team. PNB is hoping the artistic reputations of the creative collaborators will attract ticket buyers — perhaps even those who aren’t regular ballet-goers.

Costume designer Tazewell won a Tony Award for his work on Hamilton and earned nominations for several shows including The Color Purple and In the Heights. He also scored an Oscar nomination for his costume design for Steven Spielberg’s 2021 West Side Story revamp. Regular PNB audiences will also recognize him as the Swan Lake costume designer.

Many of Tazewell’s Sleeping Beauty costumes incorporate Northwest Coast Native formline designs: curving bold black lines that create ovoid shapes and figures.

Scenic designer Singletary is well known for reinterpreting his traditional Tlingit culture and mythology through the medium of glass art, which he’s worked in since the early 1980s. The Seattle artist’s work is part of many museum collections, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Boal approached him a couple of years ago with the invitation to collaborate. Singletary had never designed a ballet, but welcomed the new challenge. “It came a little out of left field, but I said ‘Yes’ immediately,” Singletary recalls.

Using his customary style, he has filled the 19th-century ballet with Tlingit lore and imagery. “It was the mythology of the story I tried to draw parallels from,” he says. 

Singletary points to two characters that play strong roles in Tlingit lore: Eagle and Raven, which represent separate halves of each clan. In this new Sleeping Beauty, the fairy Carabosse is represented by the Raven, while Aurora and her family are Eagles. The two sides are sworn to support one another, even when Carabosse casts the spell that puts Aurora and her kingdom to sleep.

The scenic design includes evergreen trees resembling those in the Olympic Peninsula’s Hoh Rainforest — their tall, shadowy forms appear in projections by Wendall K. Harrington. When Aurora’s kingdom succumbs to the sleep spell, the trees grow lusher and thicker, obscuring the slumberers.

Singletary’s contributions also include translucent glass-like boxes “etched” with Tlingit imagery, and a large bridge-like structure that resembles an eagle carved in the Tlingit style. Princess Aurora sleeps atop it, until the Prince kisses her awake. 

Asked whether mixing Coast Salish imagery with a Russian story ballet amounts to a culture clash, Singletary says The Sleeping Beauty, at its core, doesn’t belong to any one culture.

“In the end of the story, it’s sort of love conquers all. That’s not exclusive to European mythology.”

Before Singletary and Tazewell got to work, Boal had to think about how to refresh the ballet itself. He enlisted music and ballet historian Doug Fullington to reset The Sleeping Beauty, using very early 20th-century notations, photographs and other records from St. Petersburg. 

“What I really, really love to do is to try to wipe away a lot of the changes that were made to these ballets in the 20th century,” Fullington says. “In a way, it’s trying to find today in yesterday.”

For The Sleeping Beauty that has meant restoring the tempos of Peter Tchaikovsky’s score, which Fullington says were slowed in the 20th century. More visible to audiences will be the restoration of agency to Princess Aurora. She’s older in this new production, with far more say in whom she decides to marry.

“In the 19th century, the lead women really drove the action, something that was muted in the 20th century,” says Fullington. 

PNB principal dancer Angelica Generosa is one of six ballerinas rehearsing the updated Aurora. She’s performed the role in the past, but while the steps are basically the same, she says the new Aurora will be more like a 21st-century young woman than the pliant girl-child she has portrayed in past productions. Updating the story and casting choices “helps ballet stay alive,” Generosa says.

World-class artists like Singletary and Tazewell tend to be a pricey investment, but Boal says most of the production costs have gone to salaries for the craftspeople who’ve built the sets and costumes. More than 100 people have worked for months on more than 250 costumes for 184 different roles. The cost of building the costumes alone was more than $2 million. 

“I’m sure we could make a new ballet for less, but I didn’t strenuously push back [on the costs],” says PNB executive director Ellen Walker. “It’s got name familiarity, richness. My feeling is when you have something that big, that interesting, we get a lovely bump.”

Like many performing arts groups during the pandemic, PNB depended on federal assistance to keep its large staff employed and receiving health insurance. This year, PNB will spend the last of those funds, and Walker confesses impending budget shortfalls — and the loss of some 1,500 season subscribers since 2020 — keep her awake some nights. 

Despite her worries, she didn’t hesitate when Boal began talking to her about his ideas for The Sleeping Beauty update more than two years ago.

“It’s one of those classical ballet sugar bombs,” she says, laughing. She and Boal believe the family-friendly production will attract an all-ages audience, perhaps bringing in as much as $1.5 million in single ticket sales during its first two-weekend run. 

They haven’t yet scheduled the ballet for future seasons, but they expect to recoup costs with two future productions. (Although theoretically PNB could rent out the production for remounting elsewhere, given the intricate work that’s gone into it, Boal says they’re unlikely to do that.)

PNB’s New Works fundraising initiative helped pay for this ballet, and Walker and Boal also have raised individual contributions from more than 60 donors. According to Walker, the largest of those donations was more than $1 million. 

She and Boal believe their donors understand both the artistic and financial significance of refreshing evening-length story ballets.

“The full-lengths really do sustain seasons,” Boal says, contrasting them with the short, often abstract works that constitute mixed bills. “I call them tentpoles. Swan Lake always comes first, but I think Sleeping Beauty’s looking very strong.” A PNB spokesperson says advance sales have been “healthy.”

The Sleeping Beauty donors have been invited to view the production’s progress. Three weeks before opening night, a large group of donors sat in PNB’s biggest rehearsal studio, watching close to 40 dancers run through the ballet’s wedding scene. 

Leta Biasucci (as Princess Aurora) and Lucien Postlewaite (as Prince Désiré) performed the duet they’ve rehearsed for weeks, surrounded by fairies with wands, magic animals and other wedding guests. Boal and his artistic staff watched the dancers, while simultaneously evaluating the audience feedback from this rehearsal. 

“What I try to do is think about how audiences are seeing things today,” Boal says. “They’re used to screens, getting a thrill in 2.3 seconds.”

He hopes even social-media-saturated audiences will welcome this refreshed version of the classic fairy tale. Days before the production’s debut, all he can do is wait to see if the big gamble pays off.