Princess and the Goblin Ballet

I went to see a production by the Atlanta Ballet company called the Princess and the Goblin with some of my friends from work. For a ballet the plot was remarkably easy to follow. After some deliberation we decided that it involved a princess (thank you title) who goes on a quest with her remarkably useless boyfriend to save kidnapped children from the goblin king. In the process they might lead a goblin revolution. In the end she is either reunited with her long lost father the king) or leaves her useless boyfriend for a handsome prince (it's hard to tell when all the dancers are in their 20's). You might sneer at my synopsis but you try figuring out what Nutcracker or Swanlake is about with no explanation besides the dance.
Plot aside, the ballet did lots of interesting things. For one the music was often heavy on one instrument. They had a full orchestra down there, or maybe not a full orchestra since those seem to take up a whole stage but certainly a full orchestra pit. Yet despite having all those instruments there were songs that were almost all piano or almost all marimba or almost all harp. I don't know why that surprised me. There are plenty of violin solos and even oboe solos in other ballets but I guess I just haven't ever encountered a ballet with a marimba solo.
One of the main themes of the ballet seemed to be how cool toe shoes are. When she starts her adventure the princess doesn't have toe shoes, by the end she does. While I'm not entirely clear on what military advantage having toe shoes gives you in planning a goblin rebellion, it did make for some interesting choreography. Throughout the ballet a fairy? possibly alter ego? would visit the princess and they would dance together. At the beginning the fairy was wearing toe shoes and the princess wasn't. They did the same dance together completely coordinated. It was interesting to see the subtle difference that the shoes made, the shoed ballerina definitely spun much more smoothly than the one without shoes. At another point later in the ballet. The goblins have seen the princess in her toe shoes and decide that they want toe shoes too. They all clumber onto stage very clunkily trying to learn how to dance in these shoes. One interesting thing about the choreography was that many of the ballerinas only had one shoe to make them look particularly clumsy.
My very favorite part of the ballet was the goblin queen. She was phenomenal. She had this very impressive entrance where she crept like a spider all the way across the stage very very slowly.
I am not a fan of ballet fight scenes. It is too hard to tell if the combatants have made friends and are being helpful with lifts and twirls or if they are still angrily helping with lifts and twirls. If you're really in a fight with a ballerina probably the best way to win is to not catch them when they leap into your arms.