Dance Review by Mary Murfin Bayley

CRISP "ROMEO" SHOWCASES RENAISSANCE

OF THE BOLSHOI BALLET

It was an evening of astounding spectacle, high drama and crisp, elegant dancing. The Bolshoi’s Romeo and Juliet, which opened at the Paramount Wednesday night, revealed the historic Moscow company to be in splendid form.

Leonid Lavrosky’s 1946 ballet, with a cast of more than 100 led by incandescent ballerina Nina Ananiashvili, and with a lavish scenic design by Petr Williams, is the perfect vehicle to showcase the Bolshoi’s long tradition of dramatic dancing, theatrical values and the current polish and elegance of its dancers.

The company, which was last in Seattle 10 years ago, has had its ups and downs, affected by times of political change and upheaval in the former Soviet Union. Now, under the guidance of artistic director Alexei Fadeechev and general director Vladimir Vasiliev, both former leading dancers, the Bolshoi Ballet is clearly in a period of glorious renaissance.

Fadeechev is very wisely using a double-edged approach to return the company to its days of glory. On one hand, he is importing challenging abstract choreography from the West to sharpen his dancers. On the other, he is restoring the early classics, such as this Romeo and Juliet...

Lavrosky’s choreography marshals 100-plus dancers to create a tapestry of Renaissance life, rich in details of sword fighting, carousing, squabbling, begging and flirting. Even on the relatively small stage of the Paramount, the crowd scenes retained their clarity. The ballet is an unusual mixture of Stalinist grandiosity and modem insights. Lavrovsky keeps the drama barreling forward and then suddenly presents us with a surprising piece of abstraction, such as the lovely ritualistic arabesques of the wedding scene...

The intimate love story is played out against this grand cinematic background. Nina Ananiashvili’s vividly delineated Juliet is vulnerable and girlish but with a strong passionate core.

This lovely, luminous dancer has the beautiful deportment, the expressive upper body and supple back of classic Russian training, and a vivid personality of her own. Her Romeo, Sergei Filin, is also a dynamic presence, a moody romantic, whose airborne leaps convey boundless optimism in one scene and despair in another.

But this ballet is an ensemble effort and many characters contribute to the whole. Vladimir Moiseev’s sardonic, fight-loving Tybalt (he drinks a toast to his sword while his cronies toast their girlfriends) is strongly matched by the charming, devil-may-care Mercutio of Nikolai Tsiskaridze. Alexei Barsegyan plays a willful but sympathetic Paris confused by Juliet’s revulsion at his lovemaking. Evgenia Volochkova is an affectionate nurse contrasted to Juliet’s coolly powerful mother, Maria Volodina. (She shows passion only at the death of her nephew, Tybalt.) Maria Allash, as Juliet’s lighthearted companion, and Denis Medvedev as a jester provide colorful interludes. ...Juliet’s father, Andrei Sitnikov, perhaps the haughtiest of the aristocrats, also registers the uncomprehending anguish of the father of any rebellious daughter.