The Royal Danish Ballet doesn’t need The Sleeping Beauty, but Petipa’s most extravagant and fairy-packed work could use the Danes. In Russian imperial ballets, the struggle lies between power and love: a kingdom for a swan. In the reluctantly Protestant work of Petipa’s Danish coequal, August Bournonville, it’s between middle class comfort and freedom—in the form of an errant sylph, a lawless troll, or a naughty elf. But all 19th century ballets depend on mime, which only the Danes have kept up. They mime as if they were talking—it’s that natural. For this 2010 Sleeping Beauty, the recently retired director Nikolaj Hübbe wisely hired Christopher Wheeldon, a Brit, for whom The Sleeping Beauty has represented the ascension of British ballet itself. The bedazzling Tchaikovsky classic matters less for its pathos than for its characterful divertissements and mesmerizing geometric patterns, at which the preeminent classical choreographer, like Petipa, excels. And though he doesn’t choose it often enough, Wheeldon almost always rises to the occasion of great music. —Apollinaire Scherr