BALLET
sn
storytelling prescribed in the modern Russian ballet, which tens both
too much and too little. You have to know the story to understand the
relationships and the motivations, but since everybody does know this
story, there's no need to tell so drearily much of it. Actually it is not a
very good story for ballet because the lovers are so seldom and so briefly
alone together. Shakespeare's language can master this difficulty and
actualize the lovers' poignant frustrations and intensities. But Macmillan
is incapable of even the remotest approximation to
"It
seems she hangs
upon the cheek of night / As a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear." This young
choreographer, indeed, seems to me very thinly endowed with the basic
choreographic gift. I think he is in the wrong profession:
Romeo and
Juliet
looked less like a ballet than like an opera-without the singing,
of course, and therefore without any
raison d'etre
but with plenty of
local color. You could tell it was a ballet because the people moved
like ballet dancers, but you didn't come to know the meaning of the
story through dancing. True, in the first scene there was a set piece for
Romeo and his friends that showed they
were
friends by making them
all do the same incessant and unmotivated leaping. But most of the
dancing in this first scene was not only as bad as most opera-ballet but
in exactly the same style. For the lovers themselves, Macmillan con–
trived, besides the general emptiness, an awkward mixture of modes:
there were some conventionally pretty lifts and a lot of conventionally
ardent rushing about the stage--all so timed and placed as
to
have the
effect of cliche-but Juliet mooned around on her balcony like Natalie
Wood on a front porch in Kansas. A minute later she was running
down a broad staircase to
dance
with Romeo-why bother with the
whole business unless you're going to respect the balcony scene? Even
after
this
violation Macmillan was unable to make an interesting dance–
relationship between the two. Later Mercutio did die quite amusingly,
using his sword as a pretend-mandolin to sing his own epitaph; but for
"A plague
0'
both your houses!" he shook a fist in both directions.
There were many scenes and many sets into which the lovers ran to get
married or take their potions, but since nothing was realized in dance,
your boredom finally extended even to the handsome sets which had
given a real, if conventional, pleasure at first. Fonteyn and Nureyev
would have brought their unique personal power to the roles, Seymour
and Gable might have brought a special poignancy and ardor: I saw
the third or fourth cast in which Merle Park was lovely, Macleary
smoothly uninteresting and the celebrated Mercutio of David Blair
seemed quite routine.
It was so reckless of Ashton to show
The Dream,
his short version of
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
to an audience familiar with Balanchine's
