Confessions of a “Romeo” Fiend

Photograph: Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable as Juliet and Romeo in the Balcony scene of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet. Studio photograph by Anthony Crickmay.

This essay, published in the New York Times on April 1, 2007, was my debut as that newspaper’s chief dance critic. I wrote it in London; it was published just over a week before I crossed the Atlantic to live in New York. AM.

THE story of “Romeo and Juliet,” so often choreographed, lends itself to a popular idea: that dance is in any case all about sex. Those supple young bodies aglow! So ballet versions of “Romeo” have become for many the epitome of why they go to dance. The thrilling arc that leads the star-crossed lovers from their meeting in the ballroom, through their declaration by the balcony and their consummation in the bedroom, to their double suicide in the tomb: Isn’t this what ballet is all about?

This spring, my first as the chief dance critic of The New York Times, Lincoln Center offers rival productions of “Romeo”: Peter Martins’s new version at the New York City Ballet and Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 setting at American Ballet Theater. Other new versions are in embryo: Mark Morris has announced a production for next year that will use Prokofiev’s original score, with music previously unchoreographed; and Matthew Bourne starts workshop preparation this summer for a gay “Romeo, Romeo.” Looking back I see how much “Romeo” — not least, the MacMillan version — was a key to my own discovery of ballet.

To dancegoers with long memories the choice of “Romeo” is nothing new. It is part of the scene. Since the 1960s New York, London and other leading ballet cities have often had seasons in which two or more companies have sent their “Romeo” productions into the lists against one another. Many experienced fans have earned their stripes in the exercise of compare and contrast.

The story itself changes from one version to the next. Act III of Rudolf Nureyev’s all-too-clever version of 1977 started with Death taking Juliet’s maidenhead before Romeo joined her in bed; I hope that no more ghoulish an image has ever been wrought on the ballet than that. Then, in case you thought you had said goodbye to Mercutio with his death scene in Act II, the Nureyev version proved you wrong: Back came Mercutio’s ghost to bully Juliet through her big decision scenes, notwithstanding that she had scarcely met him in life.

Well, since “Romeo” itself is about rival households, Capulets versus Montagues, it seems a perfect ballet for the Jets-versus-Sharks rivalry of ballet companies: City Ballet or Ballet Theater? Bolshoi or Kirov? Royal British or Royal Danes? (In 1987 London Festival Ballet went one better, presenting two different versions — Nureyev’s and Frederick Ashton’s — in the same summer. That was the “Romeo” Civil War.)

Back in 1965 and the years that followed MacMillan’s was the new kid on the “Romeo” block. Balletomanes pitted his version (Royal Ballet originally) against Leonid Lavrovsky’s (Bolshoi Ballet), Ashton’s (Royal Danish Ballet) and John Cranko’s (Stuttgart Ballet).

The MacMillan hasn’t become the definitive ballet “Romeo,” but after more than 40 years in international repertory it has proved the most durable. When it was new, MacMillan fielded four Juliets and four Romeos, giving each of them exceptional interpretive leeway. From 1974 to 1978 I was able to catch three each of those original Juliets and Romeos, five of whom branded me for life.

If you went to see Merle Park’s Juliet (my first), you soon learned never to buy a seat on the right side of the theater, because you needed a full view of Ms. Park running down the balcony steps (in those days on the extreme right of the stage) like a spring torrent.

When Nureyev danced Romeo to Margot Fonteyn’s Juliet, he took his time to kneel and kiss the hem of her dress with as much piety as if this were the Holy Grail. And even though Fonteyn was 56 the one time I saw her dance Juliet, her reaction to his gesture was one of innocent wonder pitched on a tidal scale. After looking down at him in amazement, she threw her arms up and looked up through them to the heavens in glory, held them motionless, then brought them down, down over her face, down over her body, down in a wave that made the whole house gasp in emotion. I was 20. If there was a single moment in my life that turned me into a ballet obsessive, that was it.

I did not see Lynn Seymour, the Juliet on whom MacMillan had originally built the role, until I had seen four others. She was a rebellious Juliet in whom Romeo awoke both adult temper and molten sexuality. Where other Juliets on the balcony would look longingly up to the stars, she used to writhe like a cat in heat, brushing her arms, shoulders, neck against the balcony itself, her whole body in need of friction. “That’s not Juliet, that’s a whore,” I remember some fans saying. I was smitten, and I would spend my Seymour “Romeo” intermissions in defense of my chosen heroine.

Two decades later I interviewed Ms. Seymour about what she had done on the balcony as Juliet. Referring to the famous 1960 production of the play by Franco Zeffirelli (the basis for his 1968 film), in which Judi Dench was Juliet, Ms. Seymour joked, “That was my Judi Dench rip-off.”

Anthony Dowell returned me to the “pilgrim” aspect of Romeo. When I first saw him in the role, he walked across the ballroom floor toward Juliet as if the very ground were sacred, his feet delicately tracing each step even while his eyes and face were fixed on hers. It was good to be young with Juliets and Romeos like those. You could crave romance in your life and find it in the theater with these dancers.

The great actor Michael Gambon, in an interview with Mel Gussow, the critic and reporter for The New York Times, in Mr. Gussow’s book “Gambon: A Life in Acting,” remarked that the most overwhelming performance of anything he had ever seen was a 1977 performance of MacMillan’s “Romeo” as danced by Ms. Seymour with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Theirs was undoubtedly the greatest single account of that production I have experienced. Mr. Baryshnikov, in a 1999 interview, recalled in awe the total abandon with which Ms. Seymour had run across the stage to hurl herself at him. I do too, and I remember the flicker of alarm on his face as this comet arrived on his chest, and then how he was electrified by her. I recall too how in Act II Mr. Baryshnikov played hopscotch down the stairs into the piazza, a boy lighted up by love and rendered newly lovable.

But in 1965 that Seymour-Fonteyn-Park crop of new Juliets, who in the 1970s established the high-water mark in the role for me, were being compared by balletgoers to Galina Ulanova, whose Juliet had been the most celebrated revelation of the Bolshoi Ballet’s first tours of the West in the 1950s. That “Romeo” didn’t have much real dance; the critic Edwin Denby compared it to an Italian opera done “with complete conviction and, of course, total laryngitis.” And it has always struck me that Prokofiev conceived most of his score like movie music. If you watch the old film of that Bolshoi production, this becomes the greatest film score in history, while Ms. Ulanova’s astounding mixture of fervent naturalism and poetic lyricism puts her performance on a par with the greatest screen achievements of Lillian Gish.

I don’t agree with Mr. Gambon that nothing else has ever matched that Seymour-Baryshnikov “Romeo,” though I cheered my head off at the time. “Romeo” the play can surpass it, but I can testify, having seen more productions of the play than of the ballet, that it seldom does. And other productions of the ballet have had features that are choreographic knockouts, features that one returns to hungrily at successive performances.

BETWEEN 1985 and 1989 I often saw Ashton’s “Romeo and Juliet” danced by London Festival Ballet (today the English National Ballet, which brought it to New York in 1989); he had originally produced it for the Royal Danish Ballet in 1955. When it comes to the most famous moment in the score — the “Dance of the Capulets,” with its pounding brass bass and then the violins tracing iambs up and down the register — most settings keep these Renaissance characters earthbound and processional. (And in MacMillan’s staging, the lighting and the rich hues of Nicholas Georgiadis’s designs make this the show’s most sensational moment.) But Ashton took the point that this is a dance about patriarchy and turned it into a real piece of ballet.

Paris strode forward on the opening brass notes, struck fifth position, and then, as the violins chased up and down so excitingly, jumped up and down on the spot, his legs crisscrossing in brilliant entrechats. He closed the musical phrase with grandly gorgeous arm positions. When the music repeated, a phalanx of Capulet men followed suit. No other choreography has driven that bit of music so deep into my nervous system, and the blazing power of the Capulet men, so crucial to the drama, became more complex and poetic than ever before.

In Act III Ashton, the 20th century’s greatest master of traditional ballet gesture, used one of Prokofiev’s pileups of huge chords to show Lord Capulet formally joining his reluctant daughter Juliet’s right hand to Paris’s in betrothal. Then, as the final chord lent a note of anguished release, Juliet, unseen by her family, threw her left hand back in misery, arching her whole head and shoulders back with it. And as the music subsided in hushed sympathy, the Nurse, sole witness to this pain, softly pressed her cheek to Juliet’s outstretched left hand: a wonderful image of private grief and consolation amid a public ceremony.

The bodies-aflame ardor that “Romeo” can awaken in a ballet fan can mutate into other, richer, dance dramas. The theater critic Stark Young singled out the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham as a great theater pioneer, and I would say the same for George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Mr. Morris: They are choreographers who have extended our notion of drama itself.

Three years after Fonteyn’s Juliet changed my life, I was so astounded by the writing of the American dance critics Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce about Balanchine’s New York City Ballet that I made my first visit to New York to see it for myself. I stood in line for standing room my first morning in the city. (Mr. Baryshnikov, then dancing with City Ballet, was making his debut in “Donizetti Variations,” and the line was long.) And so, from the back of the fourth ring, I saw City Ballet dance Balanchine’s masterwork “The Four Temperaments” as the centerpiece of the program.

Nothing in “The Four Temperaments” was narrative, but all of it was dramatic, and nothing I had ever seen in any theater had been of such power. This wasn’t sexy; it was too volcanic for that. Some 28 years later I am still haunted by the memory of the bellowslike alternation of through-the-body convex and concave shapes made by Bart Cook’s Melancholic and Merrill Ashley’s Sanguinic. But I might never have awoken to ballets like that had I not first lost my heart to “Romeo,” and had certain Juliets not shown that great dancing is great drama.

@New York Times, 2007