A difficult role to dance with a dark story to tell — that’s how Houston Ballet Principal dancer Skylar Campbell sums up the role of Crown Prince Rudolf in Mayerling about to be presented on the Wortham Center stage for the first time.
In 2017, Houston Ballet performed Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s work at the Hobby Center because of flooding damage after Hurricane Harvey. Now the full-length, three hour ballet will move to its home at the Wortham.
Making his role debut in the part, Campbell is one of the principal dancers (Connor Walsh and Chase O’Connell the others) who will portray the very troubled Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The ballet is based on the true story of the 1889 murder-suicide of Rudolf, the sole heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his 17-year-old mistress — an event initially covered up by the royal family. Forced by his family into an unwanted royal marriage, Rudolf did not allow that change in circumstance to interrupt his pursuit of other women.
Known to carry around a revolver, he was addicted to morphine, had syphilis and was obsessed with death. He meets the teenager Mary Vetsera who is fascinated with him and as it turns out, more than willing to enter into a death pact with the heir to the throne.
To tell the story onstage, Campbell will be paired with six different partners, one of them Principal dancer Melody Mennite as Vetsera. Mennite will be making her last appearance in a full length story ballet for Houston Ballet.
“Even though it’s an old story in a fairly old ballet (1978) I think it still provides relevant insight into the human condition done with dance. It’s still ballet. There’s only so much you can express with movement but I think MacMillan did a really good job. He always has in his narrative pieces,” Campbell said.
Asked what was the most challenging aspect of dancing in the ballet, Campbell said, “Probably the pas de deux work that Prince Rudolf has to do with at least six different female characters. All these individuals play an important role in his life and they influence him in different ways. And takes you on the journey, a hero’s downfall.
“Usually the hero comes out on top,” Campbell said. “But for Rudolf in this particular journey, it’s a tragedy. It’s more Shakespearean in that way.”
As for the the challenges in the story itself, Campbell says: challenges: “I’ve been trying to understand why this man chose the things that he did. It makes sense to me. You want to empathize with him even though he does a lot of bad things. He has substance abuse; he has three different lovers, one of them he almost finds as an escape, his new drug. He becomes very lost and disconnected and the only way to find a way out of this life is to take his own life. That’s the tragedy of it.
“In the beginning of his life he was this progressive idealist, intellectual man who was born into a royal family where he felt suffocated by the confines of the duty to uphold his family.”
As for Mary’s motivations, Campbell said they don’t really know what they were. “We’re making assumptions here. We don’t actually know why she would want to do this.”
Campbell’s mother and stepfather were professional ballet dancers but he said he was 14 before he really got involved in ballet. His prior interests had centered on music rather than dance. “I thought I wanted to go to college for the drums. I still play the drums very avidly. Drums are my escape.” He made the switch after he started to have more friends in the dance community rather than his regular high school friends.
Although he is American, Campbell spent 13 years at the National Ballet of Canada with his wife Jackie Oakley who’s also a member of of the corps at Houston Ballet. “We just wanted to come back to America and experience dancing in an American company.”
Asked why Mayerling isn’t performed more, Campbell responded: “I think it’s the sheer difficulty. The level of dancing is very high. The experience of artists required to do all of the roles in this ballet is very high. The volume of people involved. You need a larger company. they need a company of more than 60 dancers to be able to put this on with at least three casts.”
It’s also the story line itself, he said. “It’s a difficult story to digest for some people probably. There’s suicide. There’s firearms. There’s adultery. These are all sort of sensitive themes that are human and exist in our real world but it’s not an easy going story.
“I really appreciate that we’re able to do this again and show people the life of of Prince Rudolf through the eyes of MacMillan and I think it’s important for the world to continue to be exposed to these themes.”
Performances are scheduled for May 23 through June 2 at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday, Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays at the Wortham Center, 501 Texas. For more information, call 713-227-2787 or visit houstonballet.org. $25-$220.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
