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No. 1: Eating Too Much Whipped Cream Is the Central Conflict
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What
happens if we skip dinner and go right to dessert? Will our parents be
disappointed? Angry, even? And what happens if we eat too
many sweets? Will our parents ban us from sweets altogether? Will we
fall so ill from excess Cool Whip that in our feverish dreams we travel
to a whipped cream fantasy world, where princesses named Praline and Tea
Flower choose mates among princes named Coffee and Cocoa? Will we wake
from this candy-addled slumber to discover that we've been exiled to a
hospital run by an evil doctor and his nurse henchmen?
Look, Whipped Cream is
a ballet, produced by American Ballet Theatre, set in a world that
never knew a sugar tax, and reality ought to be checked with our coats
at the door. Of course, since the parental policing of dessert
consumption is a universal experience, we might consider this story of a
boy who eats too much whipped cream and hallucinates as our childhood
sweet obsession taken to its most ridiculous extreme.
[post_ads_2]No. 2: A Princess Does Most of the Rescuing
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The protagonist Boy (because apparently Whipped Cream's
creator ran out of steam after naming the gentry of candy world)
emerges from his whipped cream fugue state to find himself under the
care of a sinister physician and a group of nurses wielding enormous
syringes. When the nurses aren't looking, Princess Praline and her
confectionary retinue arrive to save Boy.
Anyone who knows The Nutcracker might
see this as a nice role reversal, the young boy whisked away to a
sugar-sweet wonderland by a feminine anthropomorphized inanimate object.
Also of note, the doctor appears to have something of a drinking
problem, and is eventually done in by his own liquor bottles come to
life. Another lesson on the dangers of excess, I guess.
No. 3: There's Something Almost Creepy About the Art
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But in a good way! The
costumes and set design are by painter Mark Ryden, whose work generally
looks like what would happen if Alice went to Wonderland to visit a
gallery that also specialized in murder. But, again, in a good way!
Ryden's oeuvre mixes the cute, the creepy, and the enigmatic with the
kind of precision typically found in the work of the old masters.
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When
Princess Praline arrives to save the Boy, she rides into the hospital
on the back of an enormous furry dog-bear, which the ballet program
calls Snow Yak. Also in her procession are what appear to be a giraffe
carrying a cane, ladies wearing three-tiered cakes, and a candy cane
that's also a worm. Everything is delightful, strange, and, frankly,
super-cute—and yet, there's something about all of these beasts that
makes me hope they never show up in my dreams.
No. 4: It's Been Nearly 100 Years in the Making
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Whipped Cream
may have a decidedly contemporary, millennial-pink-pop-surrealist vibe,
but the original score was written in the early 1920s by German
composer Richard Strauss. First called Schlagobers, literally just "whipped cream" in the Viennese dialect, the work was first performed in 1924 at the Vienna State Opera.
It
seems that Europe may have found a frothy, treacly spectacle tonally
sour during the financial hardships following the First World War, and Schlagobers
wasn't a hit. Now, though, going into the opera house, turning off
phones, and watching a parade of dessert indulgence seems like a welcome
respite from Twitter.
[post_ads_2]No. 5: It's Actually Pretty Funny
There's something a little
disorienting about wealthy ballet regulars laughing during a
performance, perhaps because it happens so rarely. But when a ballet is
at once lovely and ridiculous enough to elicit laughs when the curtain
rises at the beginning and a hearty "Wow, that was everything" from a man wearing a khaki suit when the house lights come up at the end, it transcends mere quirk and becomes a success.
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