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Royal Ballet's "Romeo and Juliet'
Shakespeare's words, brought to life
LEWIS WHITTINGTON
The Royal Ballet’s production of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet travels so well that even handling last-minute flight delays and a heat wave on the final stop of its tour couldn’t dent the glorious classicism onstage. The company met Philadelphia with the city’s famed humidity in full 98-degree bloom. The heat was so oppressive, if fact, that it kept people away at the outdoor Mann Center in Fairmount Park, where nary a breeze could be found.
For those who sweated it out, though, the Ballet dispatched any discomfort in this bucolic setting of the Mann amphitheatre, with the city skyline glittering in the background.
For one thing, the breadth of the multi-tiered physical production by Nicholas Georgiadis is so well done that it steals attention from the dancing. Ditto for his lush costume designs. The burnished browns, purples, reds and oranges of the costumes may be elaborate, but they’re also dance-functional to show the body. MacMillan’s streamlining still conveys Shakespeare’s tragedy without making it unfold like a ballet pop-up book.
No idle bystanders
The Royal’s technical prowess and MacMillan’s choreographic invention were always evident in the pristine classicism shown in the ballet’s explosive fight scenes, the clarity of the transitional phrasing, the gestural acting and the virtuosic theatricality in the divertissements.
The stage can already be ignited with swordfights, for instance, but MacMillan doesn’t let character bystanders idle; they are drawn into the action ingeniously to add to the suspense. MacMillan is such a great choreographer that even with 50 people in non-unison motion, a scene’s focus scene is always clear and the stage composition is always maintained.
Missing ingredient: chemistry
Yet even with all of these riches, this production isn’t totally unencumbered. In the performance I saw, some scrabbled ensemble pacing led to muddy unison by the corps de ballet. Also distracting were two short expositional scenes, which were ill paced and airlessly danced. Among the principal cast, Johan Kobborg’s Romeo and Leanne Benjamin’s Juliet delivered strong technical performances, but they lacked chemistry in key moments.
Benjamin bolted out of the gate, maturing very fast from a lass at her nurse’s knee to an adolescent suffering from a bad case of the hots for Romeo. Rushed pacing made everything Benjamin did to establish character look underlined and unfinished. In her early scenes with Kobborg, she seemed to run the gamut of emotions from stoic to dazed.
These deficiencies, by the end, were anomalous and far outweighed by the production’s many strengths.
In the back half, Benjamin eventually opened up her interior performance. At the reception, the way she pulled away in difficult circular backward arabesques was ripe with expressive artistry.
A four-sword battle royal
A highlight is Tybalt’s challenge to Mercutio, which starts out mockingly and escalates to a bare-knuckle danceur duel that laces fencing choreography with ballet on a level rarely achieved elsewhere. Bennet Gartside’s Tybalt and José Martin’s Mercutio engage a four-sword battle royal, and this sequence is thrillingly staged. It seemed as if all of Shakespeare’s words that brought Tybalt alive were transposed in Gartside’s physical performance— the visceral power he achieves, for example, in a nuanced and underplayed death scene that can so often be over acted and under-danced.
The balcony scene produced gorgeous stage images in which Kobborg and Benjamin fused their chemistry with gorgeous close body turns and lyric musicality. Even some knotty lift sequences didn’t detract. Kobborg held dramatic ballonne in his aerial work and kept his turns centered and finished. Benjamin’s scenes, rejecting her arranged marriage and sealing her fate, are beautifully played.
The six men brandishing mandolins and sporting pink tights bounded in with tight unison and breakout revelry, led by Steven McRae (in brown tights) slicing across the stage in huge jumps and solid landings, with enough air for character flourishes.
Local classical musicians were assembled for the Mann Festival Orchestra for the performances. Prokofiev’s tragic decrescendos and diabolical surges led to some wayward horns, and some heat-vanquished strings disappeared in the Mann’s acoustical wormholes. But the fanfares and narrative passages were robustly paced.
To read Lewis Whittington's review of the Royal Ballet's Swan Lake, click here.
LEWIS WHITTINGTON
The Royal Ballet’s production of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet travels so well that even handling last-minute flight delays and a heat wave on the final stop of its tour couldn’t dent the glorious classicism onstage. The company met Philadelphia with the city’s famed humidity in full 98-degree bloom. The heat was so oppressive, if fact, that it kept people away at the outdoor Mann Center in Fairmount Park, where nary a breeze could be found.
For those who sweated it out, though, the Ballet dispatched any discomfort in this bucolic setting of the Mann amphitheatre, with the city skyline glittering in the background.
For one thing, the breadth of the multi-tiered physical production by Nicholas Georgiadis is so well done that it steals attention from the dancing. Ditto for his lush costume designs. The burnished browns, purples, reds and oranges of the costumes may be elaborate, but they’re also dance-functional to show the body. MacMillan’s streamlining still conveys Shakespeare’s tragedy without making it unfold like a ballet pop-up book.
No idle bystanders
The Royal’s technical prowess and MacMillan’s choreographic invention were always evident in the pristine classicism shown in the ballet’s explosive fight scenes, the clarity of the transitional phrasing, the gestural acting and the virtuosic theatricality in the divertissements.
The stage can already be ignited with swordfights, for instance, but MacMillan doesn’t let character bystanders idle; they are drawn into the action ingeniously to add to the suspense. MacMillan is such a great choreographer that even with 50 people in non-unison motion, a scene’s focus scene is always clear and the stage composition is always maintained.
Missing ingredient: chemistry
Yet even with all of these riches, this production isn’t totally unencumbered. In the performance I saw, some scrabbled ensemble pacing led to muddy unison by the corps de ballet. Also distracting were two short expositional scenes, which were ill paced and airlessly danced. Among the principal cast, Johan Kobborg’s Romeo and Leanne Benjamin’s Juliet delivered strong technical performances, but they lacked chemistry in key moments.
Benjamin bolted out of the gate, maturing very fast from a lass at her nurse’s knee to an adolescent suffering from a bad case of the hots for Romeo. Rushed pacing made everything Benjamin did to establish character look underlined and unfinished. In her early scenes with Kobborg, she seemed to run the gamut of emotions from stoic to dazed.
These deficiencies, by the end, were anomalous and far outweighed by the production’s many strengths.
In the back half, Benjamin eventually opened up her interior performance. At the reception, the way she pulled away in difficult circular backward arabesques was ripe with expressive artistry.
A four-sword battle royal
A highlight is Tybalt’s challenge to Mercutio, which starts out mockingly and escalates to a bare-knuckle danceur duel that laces fencing choreography with ballet on a level rarely achieved elsewhere. Bennet Gartside’s Tybalt and José Martin’s Mercutio engage a four-sword battle royal, and this sequence is thrillingly staged. It seemed as if all of Shakespeare’s words that brought Tybalt alive were transposed in Gartside’s physical performance— the visceral power he achieves, for example, in a nuanced and underplayed death scene that can so often be over acted and under-danced.
The balcony scene produced gorgeous stage images in which Kobborg and Benjamin fused their chemistry with gorgeous close body turns and lyric musicality. Even some knotty lift sequences didn’t detract. Kobborg held dramatic ballonne in his aerial work and kept his turns centered and finished. Benjamin’s scenes, rejecting her arranged marriage and sealing her fate, are beautifully played.
The six men brandishing mandolins and sporting pink tights bounded in with tight unison and breakout revelry, led by Steven McRae (in brown tights) slicing across the stage in huge jumps and solid landings, with enough air for character flourishes.
Local classical musicians were assembled for the Mann Festival Orchestra for the performances. Prokofiev’s tragic decrescendos and diabolical surges led to some wayward horns, and some heat-vanquished strings disappeared in the Mann’s acoustical wormholes. But the fanfares and narrative passages were robustly paced.
To read Lewis Whittington's review of the Royal Ballet's Swan Lake, click here.
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