Dance Review by Joseph H. Mazo

OH «ROMEO», YOU’RE THE BEST

Leonid Lavrovsky’s 1940 version of «Romeo and Juliet» is the best, most dramatically coherent, most intensely passionate staging of this much - choreographed ballet.

Until Thursday night, it had not been seen here since 1959, when Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet brought it to America. Finally, St. Petersburg’s Kirov Ballet, for which the work was made in the first place, has danced it at the Metropolitan Opera House. Now we know why the people who saw the Bolshoi production haven’t stopped talking about it since. A superb cast, led by guest artist Nina Ananiashvili and Andris Liepa - she all lightness and determined delicacy; he vibrantly passionate - demonstrated the brilliance of the choreographer's conception.

For Lavrovsky, apparently, traditional ballet technique was inadequate to express the fervent rush to tragedy that is the essence of Shakespeare’s play. The early scenes employ the academic vocabulary - indeed, there’s more dancing here than in some other versions - but as the drama moves toward its climax, the choreography begins to rely on highly stylized movement that is not quite pure dance and a great deal more than heightened realism... Lavrovsky’s achievement was his skill at precisely defining character with movement.

Juliet’s first scene, for example, begins with her throwing a pillow at her nurse, and ends with her staring in a mirror at her maturing body. Ananiashvili showed us the playful girl with the stage - skimming lightness of her steps, and the ripening woman with the increasing assurance of her demeanor.

Together, she and Liepa charted the course of falling in love - interestingly, the love duets are the weakest sections of the ballet - by using their remarkable technical skills for dramatic purposes instead of merely showing us how beautifully they can dance. Furthermore, both of them danced with exquisite musicality, as if their steps were physical extensions of Prokofiev’s score...