Review: Pea Town is a feel-good fantasy with a cautionary tale

Lauren Warnecke, Chicago Tribune

3.5 Stars

A fear-mongering autocrat rigs elections to maintain power as a rising resistance fights to bring back kindness. I’m talking, of course, about Princess and the Pea, the main event of the Joffrey Ballet’s mixed-repertory bill on now at the Lyric Opera.

Choreographer Dani Rowe and librettist Garen Scribner have imagined a fantastical world that’s primarily pure fun. But Rowe, who created the new one-act ballet for the Joffrey to share with Oregon Ballet Theatre, appears to also ask audiences to read between the lines. The result is a fantasy land that’s somewhere between Whoville and the “Severance” floor.

Princess and the Pea forms the finale of a quartet of works running through March 2, collectively titled Golden Hour.

Like most fairy tales, this one was ripe for a ballet. But Rowe flips the script on the Hans Christian Andersen story of a princess whose legitimacy is tested by the mother of her prospective husband. Here, our princess (brilliantly danced Thursday by Basia Rhoden) and her two bumbling, singlet-wearing henchmen (Fernando Duarte and Reed Henry) have installed an all-green society whose sole industry and nourishment is peas. Penelopea (get it?), danced Thursday by the spritely Anabelle de la Nuez, exposes Princess as the fraud she really is. In the process, she saves her adorable dads (Valentino Moneglia Zamora and Evan Boersma) from aluminum-can captivity and restores compassion and biodiversity to Pea Town (in the form of hilarious joyful dancing carrots, radishes and leeks). It’s incredible, with no detail spared —perfectly complemented by scenic and costume designer Emma Kingsbury and an equally exquisite original score by composer James Stephenson.

Nicolas Blanc’s “Under the Trees’ Voices” opens the evening, first created during the pandemic and released in a digital format before getting its stage premiere in October 2021. Plenty of COVID art has already aged poorly, but Blanc’s stunner is as salient now as it was then — the only signs of its origin story evident in the careful composition of featured couples (who were cast that way because they lived together) and copious well-spaced lines and circles separating what was at that time a precariously large cast of dancers to six feet apart. Blanc tailored the piece, which is easily his strongest yet for this company, as a tribute to his late grandfather. In fact, the beginning reads as such: an elegant, meditative requiem, the whole company of dancers bathed in Jack Mehler’s amber light, pensively rippling beneath a collection of translucent golden leaves. As composer Ezio Bosso’s richly layered symphony picks up speed, so do they; arms absorb gusts of wind like a kite in flight, an imaginary breeze tumbling torsos about while a blend of classical and contemporary steps evolves into blithe and cheerful footwork, grounded and precise compared to what’s happening from the waist up.

Read the full Chicago Tribune article here.