Dance Review by Allan Ulrich

ANANIASHVILI A WORTHY SUCCESSOR TO

JULIET INTERPRETERS

LOS ANGELES - While Romeo and Juliet remains the mother of the faux classics of the ballet world, some stagings come by their matriarchy more honestly than others.

Leonid Lavrovsky’s 1940 production, indissolubly wed to its heaving Sergei Prokofiev score, heads the list. The Bolshoi Ballet’s current cross-country America tour, the first in a decade, logically includes the Shakespeare-inspired melodrama in its repertoire. Two of the performances given over the weekend by the Moscow-based company at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion were like encountering a dear old friend who has aged a bit quicker than her contemporaries, while still retaining a modicum of her charms.

For many Americans, this Romeo and Juliet will remain forever linked with the Bolshoi. The company opened its first New York season in 1959 with this version starring the incomparable Galina Ulanova, who had brought it with her to Moscow in 1946 from Leningrad, where Lavrovsky had originally mounted it for the Kirov...

To say that most later choreographers of Romeo and Juliet must acknowledge a great debt to Lavrovsky’s dramatic realism is an understatement. In fact, details of more recent stagings, like Lady Capulet’s keening over the corpse of Tybalt, or the impossibly exuberant jester in Act II, derive from Lavrovsky, but they have lost their motivation over the years and often merely look silly in other stagings.

Yet, in its time, the Lavrovsky version delivered a bit of everything - rapturous, yet chaste love duets, brilliant swordplay, dancing episodes extremely peripheral to the plot, audacious theatrical climaxes and immense empathy with individuals whose passion transcends and ultimately heals the divisions in the social power structure. But the choreographer also brought a new quality of characterization, even to the smallest corps assignment, that must have struck a note of innovation on the Soviet cultural scene...

Friday evening, Nina Ananiashvili’s Juliet proved a worthy successor to the memorable interpreters of the role, and provided additional evidence that this role is too good to waste on the young. It is understandable why the Georgian ballerina has been cast in the opening nights of all the ballets on this tour. Although she dances at American Ballet Theatre and the Houston Ballet, the Bolshoi is still her home. The liquidity, line and combination of strength and vulnerability, the thrill of her awakening and the intensity of her passion simply stir the soul.

Andrei Uvarov invested Romeo with an ironic aspect that seemed different for the Bolshoi; the partnership was smooth, even rapturous in the Act III duet. Yan Godovsky flitted convincingly as Mercutio. Alexei Barsegyan was the importunate Paris, Evgenia Volochkova was the goodhearted nurse.