EXIT, PURSUED BY MOVEMENT THAT CUTS DEEP
Jealousy doesn’t sneak in. It bursts. You can see it take hold of Leontes the second doubt flickers behind his eyes. His body folds in. Hands clutch at air. His spine locks. His stare slices across the room, scanning for proof that isn’t there. This isn’t some vague feeling. It hits like muscle memory.
At Segerstrom in Costa Mesa through Sunday, American Ballet Theatre doesn’t just perform Christopher Wheeldon’s 2014 ballet—they dive into it, as if finally handed something worthy of their intensity. Few full-length ballets manage to grasp a story’s emotional core. When that story is by Shakespeare, and it rings true? That’s rarer still.
In the original The Winter’s Tale, everything snaps. No slow build. Leontes, King of Sicilia, decides, on instinct alone, that his pregnant wife, Hermione, is cheating on him with his closest friend. No warning. No reasoning. Just rage. He locks her away. He tosses out their newborn. He orders the child to be abandoned. Then time leaps forward. Sixteen years have passed. The baby girl survives, grows up among shepherds, and ends up falling for a prince. The play ends with a strange kind of peace. Hermione is alive. Everyone embraces.
Wheeldon doesn’t bother with all the dialogue. The ballet’s first act collapses three acts of Shakespeare into a single spiraling unravel. And that strange, infamous line—“Exit, pursued by a bear”—turns unsettling. The bear isn’t a dancer wearing a costume. The bear rolls out in a wave of silk. Puppeteer Basil Twist doesn’t give us a bear so much as the idea of one—fluid, shifting, half-real. Billowing fabric catches the light, then twists, then snaps into a shape you almost recognize. Projections ripple across the silk, flickering between sea and creature, dream and nightmare. It doesn’t pounce. It surges. And just like that, the bear isn’t something you see. It’s something that happens to you.
What could have felt like mime in this ballet becomes something else entirely. A physical language. In Sicilia, dancers slice the air. Sharp, angular, brittle. They look like they’re breaking with each step. In Bohemia, everything loosens. Movements circle and spin. There’s breath in the body again.
Herman Cornejo* brings something dangerous to Leontes. At first, he’s every inch the king: upright, composed. Later his physicality shifts. His shoulders drop and his hands start twitching. He starts flinging dancers across the stage, not out of aggression, but out of something he can’t contain. Cassandra Trenary*, as Hermione, doesn’t reach for the audience. She folds inward. Grief moves through her in slow, distant waves. You don’t just watch her suffer. You feel how far she’s drifted.
And that sixteen-year passage of time? Usually awkward to stage. Here, time is portrayed by a dancer, rushing across the stage with a silk banner that unfurls like memory. It’s a visual trick, but it works.
Skylar Brandt’s* Perdita doesn’t mirror her mother directly. The connection is seen in movement, not in mimicry. The way she moves her wrist. The way her arms swing. When she and Hermione meet each other, they immediately recognize each other. A moment that feels both sudden and long-awaited.
The corps doesn’t just fill the stage. They shape it. During Hermione’s trial, they form a courtroom that shifts with the story. Grief, judgement, stillness. They don’t dance around the drama. They hold it up.
Joby Talbot’s score fits like a second skin. It doesn’t just sit beneath the dancers but moves with them. Sicilia sounds cold and bare. Bohemia is warm, rhythmic, pulsing. In the trial, the music slowly edges into dissonance. You hardly notice the change until it closes in around you. It’s not loud. It’s contained. Even brutal. And in the statue scene, the celesta enters with notes that sound like fine china shattering in slow motion.
The Pacific Symphony, led by David LaMarche, doesn’t just play along. They catch each intake of breath, every subtle shift of weight. These are musicians who perform on Hollywood film scores. They bring the restraint and precision of a soundtrack, shaping mood without overwhelming it.
Wheeldon’s sense of drama runs through the whole production. These are the same instincts that made him a natural for Broadway later (An American in Paris, MJ the Musical). The transitions between scenes flow like edits. Movements land without fanfare. It’s staged with dramatic intent, but never veers into spectacle. The effect is more cinematic than stagey. Yet I can’t help but wonder: in smoothing the story’s messiness into flow, does Wheeldon risk sanding down some of Shakespeare’s brutal, awkward edges?
Bob Crowley’s set feels alive. Sicilia is frigid, locked down, like a fortress built from guilt. Natasha Katz’s lighting traps Leontes in his own mind with lines of light forming invisible walls. Then Bohemia cracks open. We see a magnificent tree, adorned with hanging jewels and charms. The tree doesn’t just decorate the space. It changes it, speaking to time, to growth, to the things we carry and let go. This isn’t merely storytelling through dance. It burrows deep, settling somewhere between your ribs.
No one stands tall in the end. They hover, suspended in the space between loss and longing. The final pause doesn’t resolve but lingers. And that’s what remains.
The Winter’s Tale ballet is a brilliant Shakespeare adaptation—wordless, precise, and full of breath.
*ABT rotates principal dancers across performances.
