Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty-A Gothic Mess

Choreographer/Dir. Matthew Bourne (Swan Lake, Cinderella, Marry Poppins) is a multiple Olivier & Tony Award winner.  I've been a fan of these works and anticipated a creative & entertaining  production of "Sleeping Beauty, A Gothic Romance" @ City Center.  However, I wa let down by this bawdy production which barely held a trace of Bourne's brilliant choreographic talents so I split at intermission.  The 1st 20 min. was a silly puppet show of an infant crawling on stage & climbing the curtains.  The dark fairy Carabosse (Mallificient) appears as an enormous shadow conjuring up infant Aurora.  When Carabosse appears on stage she looked like a Gothic Drag Queen who merely dragged her feet & wagged her arms.  The recorded music of Tchaikovsky's beautiful music was pounding to distraction and the choreography lacked musicality with the score.   There was too much rolling on the stage & too little dancing.  The badmittion dance was bad & overdone.  I liked the dancing of the King of the Fairies.  Aurora's dancing was lovely but she did too little of it & too much silly running barefoot, flapping her arms.  Bourne's ballet has little to praise.  The campy production was so annoying it was  difficult to sleep through; that would have been preferable.