Courtesy of The Boston Phoenix at thephoenix.com

Last night, in a desperate bid to get out of Cambridge, avoid thoughts of impending midterm doom, and actually experience that major Northeastern city that happens to reside three miles away from our campus (what’s it called again? Oh yeah, Boston.* I think the average undergrad here is lucky to go there once a month), my suitemate and I headed out to the theater district to get a glimpse of some culture and watch Giselle, a romantic ballet currently being performed by the Boston Ballet. We grabbed our $20 rush tickets around five o’clock, ventured into Chinatown for dinner,** and came back to the Boston Opera House slightly before seven o’clock to find our seats and watch the show.

This is the first year that Boston Ballet is performing at the Boston Opera House instead of the Wang Theater, but for some reason the inside of both buildings are eerily similar. If it weren’t for the differently shaped staircase in the main lobby, I’m not sure I would have noticed the change. That said, like the Wang Theater, the Boston Opera House is positively dripping with ornate grandiosity. Technically, according to Boston Ballet, there is no dress code, but let me warn you, you’re going to feel awfully silly if you show up in jeans and a t-shirt to a largely well-dressed crowd in a building that looks like this:

Courtesy of bostonpreservation.org

The other thing about attending the ballet is that you should always be prepared to clap blisters onto your hands. For some reason, possibly because unlike in a play or a musical, some soloists will only have about ten minutes of stardom on stage, it has become the custom to applaud any and every dance that seems mildly worthy of one’s time. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in Act II of the Nutcracker, which I am convinced was designed to milk the maximum adoration from any given audience, but any classical ballet more or less requires that you keep your hands at the ready.

Giselle itself is an absolutely gorgeous ballet about a peasant girl named Giselle who falls in love with a peasant boy named Loys. Unfortunately, as the jealous Hilarion discovers in Act II, Loys is actually the local nobleman Prince Albrecht, who happens to be engaged to a local noblewoman named Bathilde, and when Giselle discovers this, she first swoons and then enters a trance-like dance made of crazy and dies in her mother’s embrace.

In Act II, as her worried mother predicted, Giselle’s spirit joins the Wilis, ghosts of the forests that have all died due to betrayal by the men who they loved. Hilarion, who is grieving at Giselle’s grave, realizes too late that the sun has gone down, and the Wilis, who exist for revenge, find him and make him dance himself into exhaustion and death. Albrecht then comes to mourn Giselle as well, but when the Wilis find him, Giselle protects him from Myrtha, the Queen of the Wilis, and she gives him strength to survive until dawn. Because of her love and forgiveness, Giselle’s spirit leaves the Wilis and returns to her grave, while Albrecht is left alone in the forest in his sorrow.

If you don’t think that’s romantic, you probably don’t have a heart, although, yes, Albrecht acted a bit like a douche in Act I. Besides, the dancing was beautiful and ethereal (though, admittedly, in the first few scenes I noticed the corps having some issues with forming straight lines), and it’s a great way to spend a classy evening in the city without spending too much money. Giselle is only playing until October 11, but I highly recommend it, and if you can’t make it this weekend, Boston Ballet is performing World Passions at the end of the month and Coppelia and Ultimate Balanchine next semester.

*Fun fact: places with a larger population than Boston include Detroit, Michigan; Jacksonville, Florida; and Ft. Worth, Texas, not even including the Dallas part.

**At a place called Pho Pasteur, by the way. If you want some cheap and delicious Vietnamese food near the theater district, this is your place. And try their pineapple coconut shake, it’s like heaven in a cup.