Dance Review by Clive Barnes

STAR POWER SHIMMERS AT ABT

Over the last season or so American Ballet Theater, under the direction of Kevin McKenzie, has acquired a whole new assortment of international dance stars, and these are now being eased into the repertory.

If stars can be eased. I suppose they are meant to burst forth, and certainly a very forthright star-burst was offered at the Metropolitan Opera House on Wednesday afternoon.

The ex-Bolshoi*, Georgian dancer, the sublime Nina Ananiashvili, was making her New York debut as Juliet in Kenneth MacMillan’s expansive and extravagant «Romeo and Juliet».

MacMillan’s 1965 staging of the Prokofiev score has become popular the world over. It was influenced by various earlier versions, notably those by Leonid Lavrovsky and John Cranko, but also markedly by Franco Zeffirelli’s celebrated production of Shakespeare’s play in London for the Old Vic in 1960.

Anyone today approaching leading roles in MacMillan’s ballet - which was created on Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable, although first danced by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev - would do well to check out the video of Zeffirelli’s 1968 movie version.

The basic elements are hot blood and hot sex, adding an almost operatic and youthfully Italianate touch to Shakespeare’s tragic poetry.

Ananiashvili's Juliet/MacMillan - she has already been seen here in versions by Lavrovsky and Yuri Grigorovich - absolutely caught the wild, headstrong Juliet of MacMillan’s imagination. Beautifully danced, and handsomely partnered by an ardent Jeremy Collins, her portrait even looked like a mixture of Seymour and Fonteyn!

This was splendid...