In the nineteen-nineties, Peter Martins produced cool, clipped versions of “The Sleeping Beauty” and “Swan Lake.” With his “Romeo + Juliet,” unveiled last month at New York City Ballet, he has put another famous old piece in his refrigerator. The ballet we know as “Romeo and Juliet,” which had its first incarnation in 1938, is a thundering, romantic business. Everywhere you turn, in most productions, someone is charging around in fabulous brocades, baying for blood. It is this empurpled quality, firmly supported by the Prokofiev score, which Martins has removed. As his set designer, he chose the Danish painter Per Kirkeby, who also did his “Swan Lake.” Here, as there, Kirkeby supplied a series of curtains covered with abstract scrawls. Then, in the middle of the stage, he installed a little structure that looks like a two-car garage. This unit set serves as Juliet’s bedchamber, Friar Laurence’s cell, the Capulets’ ballroom, the family crypt, and also the background for the balcony scene, though it has no balcony. Juliet hails Romeo from her roof, as if she lived in the Bronx.
But the production’s nay-saying goes further than that. The “Romeo” with which this one will be compared is Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 version. MacMillan’s over-the-top, dunked-in-gold décor, by Nicholas Georgiadis, was obviously Martins’s negative model for his own, and MacMillan’s thrill-a-minute dramaturgy was apparently his counterexample in contriving the action. In the MacMillan, Romeo and Juliet’s awakening after their wedding night is a scene of anguish. Juliet is wild with grief, both because Romeo has killed her cousin Tybalt and, conflictingly, because he has been banished from Verona for that crime and must part from her—which, at the end of the scene, he does. In Martins’s version, Juliet again starts out unhappy, but then Romeo says he’s sorry he killed Tybalt, and she cheers up, and the two of them go back to bed until Juliet’s nurse finds them and chases Romeo out. In other words, Martins has turned a tragic episode into a comic one, and he does this repeatedly, in violation of the score. The music for the scene where Juliet’s parents discover her “dead” (she has taken the sleeping potion) is tender and sad, which must have seemed corny to Martins, for he inserted a pratfall at this juncture. As Lady Capulet is running into the room, the nurse, running in the other direction, bangs into her and falls to the floor. It’s like something from a Coen-brothers movie.
The choreography does nothing to restore the subtracted poignance. Martins has devised some nice quicksilver work for Mercutio, and there is a pretty, dainty duet for Juliet and Paris at the Capulets’ ball. But those examples tell us something: the more insignificant a dance is emotionally, the more successful Martins is choreographically. It’s when things get serious that he can’t figure out what to do. Both in the great, stomping ensemble number at the ball, the ballet’s premier symbol of violence, and in the balcony-scene duet, its chief display of love, the dancing is complicated without being interesting—Martins’s choreographic trademark.
The show has one virtue. In the past five years or so, there has been a burst of remarkable new talent at N.Y.C.B., and Martins decided to feature these fledgling virtuosos in his “Romeo.” Of all the Romeos, Juliets, Benvolios, and Mercutios in the four casts this season, not one was a principal dancer when the show opened. (The majority were still in the corps de ballet.) They didn’t do much acting, but they all managed to convince you that they were teen-agers in love, and they tore up the place. My favorite leads were Kathryn Morgan and Seth Orza—they had a dignity that broke your heart—but the two other couples I saw, Sterling Hyltin/Robert Fairchild and Tiler Peck/Sean Suozzi, were also very good, as were the Benvolios and Mercutios. I will not soon forget Andrew Veyette’s shot-from-guns performance of Mercutio’s solo at the ball. I’ll forget the rest of the ballet, but these young dancers should be honored for bringing to it whatever feeling it had.
While Martins was telling us that there is no Santa Claus, American Ballet Theatre was preparing an exceedingly idealistic new production of “The Sleeping Beauty”: the work of Kevin McKenzie, the company’s artistic director; Gelsey Kirkland, A.B.T.’s famous and infamous former ballerina (she co-authored the first and dirtiest ballet tell-all, the 1986 “Dancing on My Grave”); and Michael Chernov, an actor, director, and dramaturge who is also Kirkland’s husband. In April, Kirkland and Chernov appeared in the Guggenheim Museum’s excellent lecture-demonstration series “Works & Process,” and explained their project. “ ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ tends to be treated as something perfect,” Kirkland said. “There’s not a constant search for the truth in it.” For the new production, Chernov said, the directors made such a search, and what they found was an allegory of good and evil—of innocence (the baby Princess Aurora) poisoned by wickedness (the fairy Carabosse), and then redeemed (by Prince Désiré, aided by the good Lilac Fairy). This is not a new idea, but clearly it gave the directors a platform on which to build their show. The allegory would be stressed, and the role of the Prince, as savior, would be expanded.
After the explanations, some A.B.T. dancers came out to perform excerpts from the ballet, with coaching by Kirkland. “It’s about feeding birds,” Kirkland said to the Breadcrumb Fairy, Yuriko Kajiya, about her variation. “Call them”—Kirkland now raised her arms, in summons—“then distribute the crumbs, and when they’re happy they fly away.” The little drama had to be enacted spontaneously, she added. “Go too far, Yuriko. Don’t be careful.” Kirkland’s notes were touching, because they reminded you of what made her such a thrilling dancer: her dramatic focus and her wildness. Actually, the whole lecture-demo was moving. In old ballets—the first “Sleeping Beauty,” choreographed by Marius Petipa, had its première in 1890—meanings tend to get lost in revision. In new ballets, there is often no meaning to start with. Anyone on a quest for significance in classical dance is therefore a friend. And so when the new “Sleeping Beauty” opened, early this month, and turned out to be something of a mess, you felt sorry for it.
