“Coppelia” returns to the Milwaukee Ballet

What sort of ballet is Coppélia?

Well, the Milwaukee Ballet is promoting a “Dine with Your Doll” brunch before the Sunday matinee. Coppélia is sugar, spice and everything nice, a little-girl favorite. It’s sweet. Maybe a little too sweet.

Artistic director Michael Pink, who is staging the 1870 piece, was surprisingly frank about his feelings toward Coppélia.

“I used to hate doing this ballet,” he said.

Twenty and more years ago — MBC hasn’t done Coppélia since 1991 — it was a company staple and sure-fire box office. Pink wondered if it would still fill seats and decided to find out. Also, he thought he could do something to prevent the piece from being cloying without killing the little-girl magic.

One way of doing that was to cast his long-time friend, actor Dan Mooney, as Dr. Coppélius, to automatically knock encrusted ballet clichés off the role.

“He told me it’s a non-dancing role,” Mooney said. “Oh my god, what a workout. I studied stage movement in school, but it wasn’t like this.”

Mooney has found ballet rehearsals fascinating, and vastly different from his usual process.

“They might rehearse a two-minute passage for an hour,” Mooney said. “And you’re in a big room with a lot of people, and all these pockets of activity are going on, and yet all of it happens in absolute silence. If you had 50 actors in a room like that, it would be chaos.”

Pink’s second trick is to stage Coppélia with Auguste Bournonville in mind. Bournonville (1805-1879) left Paris as ballet declined mid-century and strong male dancing all but disappeared from the French stage. He took over the Royal Danish Ballet, where he promoted male dancing, a modest and elegant style, and precise placement and rhythm. The Royal Danish upholds the distinct Bournonville style to this day. Bournonville hated mugging and exaggeration, which often crop up in ballets such as Coppélia.

Third, Pink sees in Coppélia some French farce amid the fable, which could liven the proceedings. I’ve never seen Coppélia played as farce, but it makes sense, given the story: Villagers Franz and Swanilda are in love. But a reclusive beauty Franz spies through a window in Dr. Coppélius’ mysterious workshop is turning his head. Curious and furious, Swanilda sneaks into the shop and discovers that her competition is a mechanical doll. In Act 2, to teach Franz a lesson, Swanilda disguises herself as the doll and strings Franz along. Hi-jinks ensue.

Fallout from this prank lands on the poor doctor, who mistakenly believes that he has reached his lifelong Frankensteinian goal of creating a life.

That gave Mooney something to work with.

“Who is he?” Mooney mused, at a joint interview with Pink. “He’s the only guy in town who locks his door. Nobody knows about him.

“I think we’ve given the character some depth,” Pink said. “He’s trying to create life. He has to believe he can do it. It’s devastating to him when he realizes he’s been tricked.”

And yet…

“This isn’t the dark side of Coppélia,” Mooney said, through a reassuring smile.

“It’s a traditional staging on a traditional set, which we’ve rented from Houston Ballet,” Pink said. “We credit Arthur St. Leon with the choreography.”

St. Leon did create the piece and it was a hit at a time when ballet was out of vogue in Paris. Its 16-year-old star, Giuseppina Bozzachi, was a sensation. But after 18 performances, the city came under siege amid the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Opera closed. Bozzachi, weakened by the deprivations of war, contracted smallpox and died on her 17th birthday.

The Coppélia we know comes filtered through Russian companies and then through English companies. Pink, as an English dancer, grew up performing versions flavored by Leonid Massine and Frederish Ashton. Back in the day, the Milwaukee Ballet performed the American Ballet Theater version.

Given the checkered pedigree, Pink feels free to add elements that he feels are needed to clarify the plot, deepen characters and make the piece funnier.

“What we think of as tradition became tradition over the last 50 years,” Pink said, noting that he’s keeping everything he feels traces to the original. His point is that a Milwaukee Ballet/ABT staging from the 1970s was no more authentic than that the Michael Pink version we’ll see this weekend.

Act 3 is a wedding celebration and a string of dances with no real plot. Act 1 is exposition with a few dances, including a manly Mazurka. Act 2 tells and resolves the story. In an effort to get to some intimacy, Pink moved the Act 2 rehearsals to a small studio and limited it the principals.

“We’re writing it as we go along,” Mooney said. “It’s conversation. But it’s without words. Usually, an actor goes off and learns his part by himself. But here, it’s all visual, so you can’t learn it alone. I’ve had some experience with this, because I’ve worked with deaf actors. This has everything to do with interaction. ”

Mooney, best known in Milwaukee for his many leading roles at the Rep, is a subtle actor. He would rather draw the audience in than overwhelm them, and would rather underact than overact. Mooney is trying to find just the right scale to match the dancers, play to the big scale of Uihlein Hall and yet not fall into exaggeration and cliché.

It must be just right, neither too big nor too small.

“At some point,” Pink said to his old friend, “I might ask you to ‘speak’ a little louder.”

The Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra will play Leo Delibes’ score. Julianne Kepley and Luz San Miguel will alternate in the role of Swanilda.

Times and tickets: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday and 1:30 p.m. Sunday, May 19-22, at Marcus Center Uihlein Hall. Tickets are $25-$89 at the Milwaukee Ballet website; at the company’s ticket line, 414 902-2103; and at the Marcus Center box office, 414 273-7206.