Those Star-Crossed Lovers With Sun-Splashed Colors
<First published online in the New York Times, May 3, 2007>
In the ballroom scene of Peter Martins’s new “Romeo and Juliet” for New York City Ballet, each pair of Capulet guests enters by posing dramatically, as if to say, “Do you like the way we’re dressed?” At the gala premiere on Tuesday (attended by Bill Clinton, who took the seat forever associated with Lincoln Kirstein and was greeted with a standing ovation), this certainly rang a bell.
After all, the more ritzily dressed members of the audience had just made similar entrances into the New York State Theater, with a red carpet and photographers. But the posey behavior of these Capulet guests is funny in the wrong way, because their costumes — by Per Kirkeby (who also designed the décor) and Kirsten Lund Nielsen — are, alas, ghastly. Imagine bargain-basement Italian Renaissance with mod-abstract squiggles.
The painted backdrop and wings look as if they had been designed by two different AbEx painters who disagreed. The central set, painted to evoke gray stone walls, is rearranged from scene to scene: Juliet on the balcony looks as if she has wandered onto the battlements in “Spamalot.”
Elsewhere the costumes’ main color scheme — Tybalt is yellow, Romeo blue, Mercutio purple — reminded me of the old National Ballet of Cuba production of “Giselle,” which was arranged around the fading eyesight of its prima ballerina, Alicia Alonso, with all the key characters in Giselle’s life dressed in individually bright colors, so that she knew what to do with the dancer wearing orange as opposed to the one in mauve. In the first half these designs are this production’s main problem.
Its main virtue, throughout, is its young dancers. On opening night Sterling Hyltin was a bright, appealing Juliet with flashes of dance brilliance, and Robert Fairchild was sometimes compellingly poetic and always a winningly lyrical presence as Romeo. Mr. Martins’s choreography isn’t exceptional in any way, but there are sequences — especially in the dances for Mercutio (the first-cast Daniel Ulbricht scored deftly here) — where the witty step-by-step dance arrangement feels watertight in its moment-by-moment fit to the score.
It’s a dance-dance-dance “Romeo,” with the townswomen on point (not, as in some older productions, in heels) dancing in symmetrical formations with their male partners. In one effective image these townsfolk dance in tight concentric circles around Mercutio, who bobs up and down in double air turns, while Benvolio brightly circumnavigates them all in a circle of leaps. The main disappointment is that in choreographing for Romeo and Juliet, Mr. Martins tends to gets stuck in one groove after another.
The balcony pas de deux ends with Juliet held high above Romeo’s head, her torso and arms arched back in what should be a truly eloquent image of emotional abandon that becomes more remarkable as he then lowers her while she holds this same immobile pose. For a moment we seem to be flashing forward to the corpse that we know Juliet will become. Sure enough, at the end of the final pas de deux, when Romeo lifts Juliet’s inert body (thinking she’s dead when she is merely lifeless), we see that same lift, that same immobility.
We ought to be feeling all manner of love-death paradoxes on both occasions. We can’t, though, because Mr. Martins has begun his balcony pas de deux with Juliet arching in much the same fashion back over Romeo’s shoulder in abandon. All the solos and pas de deux for Romeo and Juliet look like Mr. Martins’s rough sketches. He can be a more focused, precise dance maker than he is here.
In only one respect is this production radical: Prokoviev’s score — well played by the City Ballet orchestra under Fayçal Karoui, with the wind section especially responsive — has been divided into two acts rather than three. Although I have called this music the greatest film score ever written, it nonetheless achieves theatrically effective endings to all three of its acts (Juliet on her balcony, the Capulets grieving over Tybalt’s corpse, Romeo and Juliet both dead at center stage). Mr. Martins ends his first act, after what is usually the ballet’s Act II, Scene 1, with Romeo happily holding the letter just given him by Juliet’s nurse: a nice effect of narrative suspense, but lacking Prokoviev’s feeling for a strong conclusion.
You can’t help wishing that each pas de deux were shaped with a stronger sense of plot, of emotions changing or conflicting, and that the whole ballet had a greater sense of dramatic urgency. Mr. Martins isn’t the first to omit Rosaline, thus giving us no reason that Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio should turn up uninvited at the Capulet ball. But when Frederick Ashton did this in his 1955 production for the Royal Danish Ballet (presumably the version the Danish-born Mr. Martins grew up with), he made the men’s mysterious arrival fateful, like that of the three characters who come masked to the ball in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Here none of the Capulets are looking anyway, even when these guys proceed to dance at center stage.
And when Romeo first dances with Juliet in this same scene? Twenty-two Capulet guests busy themselves in conversational groups, looking everywhere but at the star-crossed lovers. Yet when the scene is an open piazza in Verona, then the supporting characters are — as in most “Romeo” productions — lively onlookers, reacting keenly to the quarrels and sword fights. In the first half, such inconsistencies seem merely incidental. After intermission they pile up. The otherwise decent Romeo, having run Tybalt through once, then winds his robe round Tybalt’s head while stabbing him repeatedly in the back. Lord Capulet expresses his anger with his defiant daughter by hitting her so strongly that the audience gasps.
The leading adult roles, although played by company principals like Darci Kistler, Jock Soto, Nikolaj Hübbe and Albert Evans, are mere ciphers. The production is carried by the company’s youngsters, just as Mr. Martins hoped it would be. One just wishes that he had rewarded them with richer fare and taken them on a more powerful dramatic arc toward tragedy.
@New York Times, 2007