Tulsa Ballet: Swan Lake
Tulsa Performing Arts Center
October 25, 2026
A classical story ballet loves a reckless, restless, befuddled, conflicted man. Giselle’s Albrecht, La Sylphide’s James, Coppelia’s Franz: many of the dudes at the center of ballet’s greatest narratives wouldn’t be out of place in front of a podcast mic, breaking down how they found themselves lost in forests and in thrall to enchanted, ghostly, or otherwise otherworldly women.
Nineteenth-century ballet’s obsession with the puer archetype—the caddish, dreamy guy who gets wrecked after some form of trickery and either has to die or grow up—isn’t that surprising, given the influence of Romanticism on the art form. His folk-tale-adjacent story tends to be less of a hero’s journey and more of a cautionary tale: listen to your mom, stay away from rizzed-out older men, and tread carefully with the woman-shaped figure you see in the fog / on the balcony / in the window.
Arriving near the end of the Romantic era, Swan Lake’s Prince Siegfried is an extreme version of ballet’s bewildered man, bearing a melancholy that borders on emo. During Tulsa Ballet’s performance last weekend, I could almost imagine Edward Truelove as Siegfried in full black turtleneck with a patchouli-scented New Directions paperback in his pocket. A political marriage? They’re all dead to him. A suggestion that he might be drinking too much? Absurd. A hunting trip with his new 21st birthday crossbow in a dark, misty forest? Immediate yes.
Siegfried will always be That Boy, but every generation has its own version of how things go for him. There’ve been many Swan Lake interpretations since its Moscow premiere in 1877, including Matthew Bourne’s groundbreaking all-male fantasia and a 2013 Swedish techno version in which the heroin-addicted swans are prostitutes ruled by Rothbart, traditionally a sorcerer, now their pimp.
Tulsa Ballet’s version, created nearly 30 years ago, operates with radical efficiency, cutting the run time from four hours to two and a half. Tulsa Symphony Orchestra, sure-handedly conducted by Peter Stafford Wilson, rocketed through Tchaikovsky’s score last weekend to deliver the fastest rendition I’ve ever heard, without sacrificing either authority or detail.