Best Manly Ballet

Stevenson's biggest ballet since Dracula was billed as a star vehicle for Lauren Anderson, the African-American principal Stevenson spotted at the Houston Ballet Academy when she was just a child. But while the title role certainly allowed Anderson to show off her explosive athleticism and theatricalism, Cleopatra turned out to be a much broader ballet for the whole company, including, most surprisingly, the men. In Cleopatra's dances with her lovers, Stevenson let Caesar (Timothy O'Keefe) and Marc Anthony (Dominic Walsh) out from the conventional male partnering positions behind -- or beneath -- the ballerina, and both men seemed to jump at the opportunity to dance and act as much as the star. Stevenson even left Anderson out of the picture entirely in another pas de deux. The homoerotic and devilish dance between the burly Nicholas Leschke and the diminutive Mauricio Canete was as captivating as it was unusual. And the male corps de ballet, Stevenson's stars of tomorrow, nearly stole the show with a sequence of leaps in the Roman Senate that barely allowed the dancers' feet to touch the ground. Once again, Houston Ballet's artistic director has shown he can tweak the traditional in just the right way.