Carrie, of “Sex and the City,” has been awarded her Prince Charming for the show’s final season. We have seen what she can do with regular Joes and Mr. Big, so it is only fitting that for her swan song, she gets to play with the man of a thousand dreams.
Mikhail Baryshnikov is the prince, a no-brainer from the casting department. From the moment he fled the Soviet Union’s Kirov Ballet in 1974 to seek political asylum in Canada, he has starred in the fairy tales girls harbor well into their know-better years.
The fantasy prince is one of those secrets from the psyche that producers of “Sex and the City ” mine so well. They know Prince Charming travels with us, throughout our lives. It doesn’t matter how old we are, how liberated, how sophisticated or cynical. He lives in the souls of women who will spend a medium-size mortgage payment on a pair of shoes while they eagerly await a marriage proposal but dread the possibility of being presented with a “bad engagement ring,” all recurring themes of the show.
The prince is fashioned in the imagination of middle-school girls in whose lives the only men of consequence were Daddy, Danskin-wearing heroes as presented by Disney and the Brothers Grimm, or the pimply faced boys who talked to our chests.
Baryshnikov embodies all that we could dare imagine. He wears a sword for slaying dragons. He can leap across the stage, as if it were a tall building, to come to our rescue. At his touch, we become light and graceful. He holds us aloft, and our skirts swirl around his thighs. And that is as racy as that plot ever went, because we didn’t have any more story line. So the prince stayed in non-consummated limbo with us in the land of happily ever after.
In the HBO fantasy, Carrie (played by Sarah Jessica Parker, who is the show’s executive producer) is the object of the prince’s attentions. Parker is here to show us how happily ever after plays in the 21st Century. The prince–soulful looks, great body, even if he is only 5 feet 7 inches tall, exquisite manners–plans a romantic surprise without any input from Parker, the princess.
He obtains tickets to the opera, dresses himself without being told what to wear and he provides her with the perfect frock–a flushed pink Oscar de la Renta sleeveless silk faille dress with a poufy short skirt. It’s exactly her style and size. He knows when to make the big move, where to go, what to wear, how to shop, and he reads her poetry by the fire. Is it any wonder she swoons from romantic-gesture overload? Or was it because Baryshnikov, er, his character, Alexandr Petrofsky, asked her to dance? She blames her blackout moment on being an American and seeks an antidote at McDonald’s. Here, under the golden arches, she allows Baryshnikov/Petrofsky to twirl her around the linoleum.
The performance pressure must have been staggering. Were the prince of dreams to manifest himself and hold out his hand in the shall-we-dance gesture, most of the ardent flame-keepers would feign fainting, too.
Baryshnikov is generous with his royal patronage. He knows he’s the prince in more fairy tales than this one playing on HBO. Years ago, when he was living with the delectable Jessica Lange, and fathered their child, he stayed single so as not to tarnish his princely image. Even in more recent times, he has had three children with former American Ballet Theater ballerina Lisa Rinehart, yet they have not married. The prince cannot be part of the dreamscape if he is married. Middle-school musings do not allow for such infidelities; neither do they consider commitment issues.
There are detractors who hiss that Baryshnikov, at 56, is too old for the 38-year-old Carrie. She says he is “worldly-wise and in his lover-perfect early-50s.” She pronounces “lover,” as “lov-ah,” resorting to an arcane valentine-speak not usually heard ’round the salad plates on “Sex.” Hanging with Prince Charming will do this to a girl.
Fans and critics speculate endlessly about the outcome of this tryst. It is so obvious. The prince, who is perfect, will not be Carrie’s Mr. Right, because of his flawlessness. She will never feel comfortable with a man who looks better than she in tights. She will realize she needs someone with texture, with chinks in his personality and chunks in his midsection. It is her friends who are the perfect fit. The show’s over.
Baryshnikov will pirouette away from this Prince Charming role, his royal image retooled for at least another decade, allowing him to play the part again and again, on stage, in films and in women’s dreams.
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