Ocean’s Kingdom

New York City Ballet

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It’s no surprise that Paul McCartney’s curtain call at the debut of his first ballet score earned the loudest cheers of the evening, said James C. Taylor in the Los Angeles Times. The impromptu shimmy that the ex-Beatle threw in with his bow was probably “the freshest movement onstage all night.” McCartney’s music proved undistinguished: At its best, it “sounds like a competent Hollywood soundtrack to a fairy-tale-themed film.” And though Sir Paul’s compositions do “manage to underscore the action,” that action is barely worth watching. The scenario McCartney invented is “standard storybook stuff” about an aquatic princess who falls in love with an earthbound prince, while the dances credited to Peter Martins “are not just forgettable, they’re boring.”

The whole evening felt like “ballet for beginners,” said Melissa Whitworth in the London Telegraph. The simplistic, boy-meets-girl story has “something of a school play feel to it,” and the choreography did little justice to stars Sara Mearns and Robert Fairchild, or any other members of one of America’s finest ballet companies. The leads are asked to express happiness by whirling each other around; they convey sadness through deep back bends. Evidently, McCartney had a hand in the choreography. He “should have left it to the experts.”

Don’t pin all the blame on Paul, said Alastair Macaulay in The New York Times. Martins, who’s been the company’s ballet master in chief since 1983, “has turned better music than Mr. McCartney’s into lead many times before now.” The score contains glimpses of greatness: “Some of its atmospheres evoke Ravel, and its jolliest passages are on the cusp of Bernstein’s Candide.” With ballet losing its audience in America, what it might need most is “an unpretentious musical craftsman” who can produce scores for fresh, new stories, said Robert Johnson in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. Yet if McCartney hopes to be that savior, he needs to find better collaborators.