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Matt Juliano

Dancing Shoes with Nimble Soles - Orlando Ballet's "Romeo and Juliet"

On October 19, 2024 I saw Orlando Ballet's production of Romeo and Juliet.  Being a Shakespeare enthusiast I was really looking forward to it and it did not disappoint.  It was a new choreography of an old ballet and it succeeded both in being entertaining and moving in its own right and being a really good adaptation of Shakespeare's play, which is kind of incredible given that in ballet you don't, you know... talk.  


Like a lot of Orlando Ballet's productions in the past few years this was an ambitious show and given what I've heard about licensing new productions, I suspect a not-inexpensive one.  I believe this run did well financially which is great as artistic ambition and rejuvenation should be rewarded, especially in a venerable art form where it's probably tempting (and safer) to just do Swan Lake every year.  I like seeing arts organizations invest in the future of the repertoire.


Some Background


Romeo and Juliet's music was written by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev in 1935.  The ballet premiered in 1938 and was revised in 1940.  (Apparently the original version had a happy ending.)  I had definitely heard snippets of the music before, particularly the opening theme of the overture and the Dance of the Knights which ends up becoming a sort of theme for the Capulets. 


The music was performed live by the Orlando Philharmonic which is always nice.  


The choreography was created by James Sofranko for the Grand Rapids Ballet, where he serves as Artistic Director.  It premiered in February 2023.  Sofranko's brother Joe, an actor and Shakespeare guy, did the fight choreography which involves actual sword fights that, per the program, are rare in ballet.   


That's right, this ballet has a fight choreographer.


The Adaptation


Going in to this I was really curious how the adaptation was going to be. I imagine adapting a theater piece where the primary draw is the language itself into a wordless medium is a challenge but it was impressive how well it translated.


The Plot


The plot of the ballet is extremely close to the play.  All of the play's events are present and all the ballet scenes are directly from the play and unfold in the same order.  All the important characters, and most of the minor ones, are here, too.  Not surprisingly there's a decent amount of interstitial scenes that are cut, as complicated dialog scenes can't easily be done in ballet, but amazingly the narratives and ideas of those scenes have largely been accounted for and rolled elegantly into other places.  (I'll get to some examples later.)


The Tone


The ballet definitely reflects an idea I mentioned in my Romeo + Juliet piece as articulated by Dartmouth professor Peter Saccio that "It is key to the effect of Romeo and Juliet that it is a tragedy that could have been a comedy. It almost should have been a comedy."


The mood of the ballet is light until Romeo fights Tybalt and then there's a hard tone shift, which is very much in line with the source material.  Obviously, there's no suicide spoiling prologue and there's nothing in the overture that telegraphs that this is a tragedy, as there is in, say Don Giovanni, where some playful themes are bookended by some heavy ominous strains.


The opening brawl reads as kind of comic.  The music is more fun and chipper than anything else and several of the on stage details, like the slow escalation where more and more people get drawn into the fight, the old heads of the family charging into the fray at center stage, tiredly swinging their swords ungracefully at each other before the townsfolk in background finally decide to join in by lobbing volleys of tomatoes across the stage at each other, all comes across more as a bit of silly fun than a deadly ancient enmity.


Even the pivotal scene where Mercutio dies starts out comic, with Mercutio mostly screwing around and it's not super clear if either combatant is even in all that much danger  The music is again, fun.  This all changes when Romeo fights Tybalt, though, with the music taking a more serious turn and the fight choreography getting more violent.  


This downbeat turn persists all the way to the end of the ballet with even the happiest moment, Romeo and Juliet's dance after their marriage consummation, being shot through with poignance, grief, and sadness.

 

I have to qualify one thing, regarding the absence of an opening monolog.  During the overture the stage was completely dark except for four spotlights: one on Capulet and Lady Capulet in the background stage right, one on Juliet in the foreground in front of them, and the same thing on stage left with Montague and Lady Montague and Romeo respectively.  The lighting managed to make everyone almost look like they were in black and white.  At the time, this didn't stand out as particularly ominous given the score, but the way the monochrome light scheme made everyone look just a little bit dead, this could have been seen as an analog to the tragic prologue.


Stagecraft


Standard theater disclaimer here, as I don't know anything about the tech aspect of stagecraft; I'm just giving my impressions as a layman.


The Sets


A lot of the sets were really impressive.  The piazza set, which utilized a lot of stage real estate and had multiple levels of depth was a visually interesting, but not overwhelming setting for the opening brawl and the pivotal fight between Tybalt and Mercutio and Romeo.  The tomb set was simple but also really nice and, for lack of a better word, "felt" like a mausoleum. 


In addition to just the aesthetics, there were several parts where the set reinforced the themes and ideas of the drama, like the set for the famous balcony scene.   It was sparse, but really open, and the darkness wasn't oppressive but felt like an extension of the star filled sky in the background, and gave the impression of the new unconstrained world full of endless possibility that Romeo and Juliet's love had revealed.  And it gave the pair a lot of space to perform a really impassioned and impressive pas de deux


Also, I really liked how Act 3 opened with just a spotlight on the two lovers asleep in bed with the same monochrome lighting scheme as the opening, which really made its look like they were lying dead in a tomb until Romeo awoke, opened the curtains and the light changed.   For a moment I thought it was a flash forward to their ultimate fate.  It was a really neat detail and bit of foreshadowing just from the set design. 


Character Designs


In a medium where there's no talking, and especially in a production that often has a lot of people on stage, allowing the audience, most of whom will be too far away to see faces, to identify characters is really important.


I think this production did a good job of making everyone visually distinctive enough to tell them apart at distance.  Consistently dressing Benvolio in maroon and Mercutio in yellow, for example, was really helpful.  They also managed to use visual design for characterization, such as Tybalt being introduced with two weapons which signals to the audience that he's twice as stabby everyone else who only had one.


Also, having the Nurse make a big show of the dress Juliet will be wearing to the party is a clever way to make sure that the audience can always spot her in the crowded ball scene.  


The Sword Fights


As is probably evident from the production having a credited fight choreographer, this Romeo and Juliet had some legit stage fights.  Confrontations in ballet are usually metaphorical displays of two people dancing together, or at each other, but here there were literal swords clacking together.


The fights were convincing and had a lot of moving parts; the opening brawl starts small but ends with almost a dozen people fencing on stage among a crowd of onlookers.  I remember smirking and thinking "Now you're just showing off."  I was really impressed how the fights were also synced to the score, with swords clashing together in time with the music but never feeling like the dancers were waiting around so the hits would land on the beat.  It was all very fluid and I can't imagine how much practice it required.


There was also good characterization during the fights with different combatants having different styles.  Old Capulet and Old Montauge use broader swords and don't so much fence as stand there and ponderously whale at each other.  It very much captures the spirit of Old Capulet calling for his long sword and his wife saying "A crutch, a crutch! Why call you for a sword?; in other words: "You're way too old for this sh*t"


Mercutio and Tybalt also fight very differently than each other.  Mercutio's style incorporates more balletic leaps than we'd seen previously and conveys his devil may care screwing around vibe where Tybalt is more straightforward.  As Mercutio describes in the play, Tybalt "fights by the book of arithmetic."


Great care and attention was obviously given to all of this and it's really great that the Sofrankos used every element, even one that isn't usually done in ballet, for characterization.  


Blocking


I also want to mention a couple of small touches in the blocking that speak to the care that was taken in the adaptation.


At the Capulet's ball after Romeo and Juliet have seen each other, Juliet has a solo dance where she cuts loose a lot more than in the rigid formulaic group dance that preceded it.  During her dance, Romeo is watching from stage left and the production puts Paris right next to him.  (Paris has met and had a very low key dance with Juliet earlier.)   I really like putting the two men right next to each other because it means that when Juliet is dancing and glancing over to stage left,  Paris almost certainly thinks she's dancing for him.  (Poor guy.)  It's a very small detail that wouldn't be necessary but I'm glad was included.


I also liked how when Romeo and Juliet dance together shortly afterwards, the rest of the cast is clustered in the rear of the stage in dim lighting with their backs to the pair. It gave the impression that even though there were a lot of people at the party, for Romeo and Juliet everyone else faded into the background and they only had eyes for each other.


A Missed Message


I guess the only thing I was a little surprised at was that there was nothing to show that Romeo didn't receive Friar Lawrence's message that Juliet wasn't really dead.  It's kind of the only thing in the entire production that I would say if an audience didn't already know the story they might be a little unsure what Lawrence's plan actually was and how it went awry.   That's not a big deal in this show, as it's Romeo and Juliet and most people are familiar enough to get it, and like I mentioned in my Casanova piece, lots of ballets have plot details that aren't immediately apparent to a casual viewer.  I used Swan Lake as an example there:


"After all, Act 2 of Swan Lake where Odette explains to Siegfried that she's been cursed by a sorcerer to turn into a swan during the daytime and she needs to be loved by one who has never loved before to break the curse is also not parsable without the meta text. And Swan Lake is one of the most popular ballets ever. so... shrug?"


It's hardly a big deal and I really only noticed because it was a bit of an outlier for this show which I think was otherwise very comprehensible without the synopsis.


The Dancing 


I'm kind of burying the lede here by starting the discussion of the actual dancing in a piece about a ballet this far in, but here we are.  (Apologies for my layman's lack of vocabulary in this section, I'll aspire to more than "Jump look hard!")


Characterization through Movement


Something I liked and found really interesting was how this production was able to show personality through movement.  The obvious example here is Mercutio, who I'll use as representative of this idea.


Mercutio is the play's most dynamic and charismatic character, and in this production he danced very differently than Romeo or Benvolio.  In the scene where the three men dance prior to going into the party there were multiple times where Benovlio would do a move, then Romeo would do the same move, but then Mercutio would do mostly the same move with some flair at the end.  He had an extra bit of flamboyance which stood out since it was contrasted against the other two and I could have pegged him as Mercutio immediately even if I hadn't figured it out by process of elimination.


His personality came through again when he and Benvolio were trying to distract all the Capulets to let Romeo get away.  Benvolio did some impressive leaps by himself and Mercutio did some impressive leaps while also kissing ladies' hands and goosing people.  He very quickly became an audience favorite as much as he's always been a playgoer's favorite.  (His dancer, Sebastian Marriot-Smith, got a pretty hearty ovation during the curtain call.)


His antics continue through his fight with Tybalt and up until his death.  Even after he is stabbed, he still gathers himself for fun and jokes, and makes time to dance with women who I think are credited as "Harlots" in the program.  Similar to how it's played in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet film, the other characters don't seem to realize he's actually hurt and bleeding out.  And then he drops one of the harlots, and the entire atmosphere changes.  


Juliet + Paris vs Juliet + Romeo


This production captured an idea I talked about in my Romeo + Juliet review, which is the contrast between Paris and Romeo purely as reflected in the language of the characters. 


The gist of it is this: In the play Juliet's first impression of Paris comes from her mother saying weird stilted couplets about him.  Juliet doesn't even really respond, she just gets bad poetry said at her.  To quote myself, "Paris, through just the language here, becomes a representative of a rigid and unimaginative courtship and social order.  Against that, Juliet has her first sonnet with Romeo."  In the play, Romeo and Juliet's language changes drastically once they meet and shows an immense amount of freedom and imagination. 


In the ballet this change is shown in the dance.  When Juliet dances with Paris, she's stiff, vertical, and mostly does slow circles and leg lifts.  He does not leave his feet and they don't cover very much ground.  Even the lifts seem slow and unenthusiastic.  


Juliet's dances with Romeo are completely different and the contrast begins immediately,  After she removes his mask, the first thing she does is a deep ecstatic back bend over his arm, like she trusts him, is falling into him, is free.  (It's also a nice touch that when she first sees Paris she instinctively backs away a little, but she instinctively approaches Romeo.)


When Juliet and Romeo dance they make use of the entire stage; there's leaps, spins, and parts where they do the same jumps in unison.  They are quite literally in sync with each other.  In addition to using the entire stage, they also cover a good vertical distance.  The lifts are dramatic, they circle each other on their feet, they're sometimes on the ground.  They're together at all levels and utilize the whole space and Hitomi Nakamura and Amir Dodarkhojayev really sold the intimacy.


Juliet meets Romeo right after a big formal and regimented dance by most of the company and its rigidity heightened the effect of the leads' new freedom of movement.


That Sofranko took a dramatic contrast that in the play is shown purely in the spoken word and translated it to dance is really cool.  And that this was so parseable even on a first viewing to someone like me who doesn't know very much about ballet speaks to the elegance of it all.


Dance with the "Dead"


For me, absolutely the most striking dance was Romeo's dance with Juliet's "corpse" in the tomb at the end.  It was reminiscent of their earlier love dances, with big lifts and spins, but added the complication that Juliet was dead weight the entire time.  (Hitomi Nakamura and Amir Dodarkhojayev told me later that she wasn't completely dead weight but couldn't help him all that much.  Also, as she had her eyes closed it was apparently extremely disorienting to be spun about and not have a strong sense where the front of the stage was.)


It's really hard to convey how devastating it was to see Romeo lift Juliet the way he had in the balcony scene but now with her non-responsive body and lolling head. The effect was amplified by the heart wrenching score and by the knowledge that his grief is premature and he's never going to know she wasn't actually dead.  


And it shouldn't be left unsaid: the physicality required to pull it off is incredible. 


Dialog through Movement 


There were also a lot of moments where the choreography conveyed things from the play's dialog really well.  All the moments I'm talking about wouldn't require any particular knowledge beforehand to work and would be understandable on their own but knowing the play text pretty well reveals an extra layer of meaning.


Probably my favorite small moment was how the ballet captured the nightingale / lark conversation from the morning after Romeo and Juliet's night together.  In the play Romeo and Juliet have this exchange upon awakening:


JULIET

 Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day.

It was the nightingale, and not the lark,

That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.

Nightly she sings on yond pomegranate tree.

 Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.


ROMEO

It was the lark, the herald of the morn,

No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops.

I must be gone and live, or stay and die.


JULIET

Yond light is not daylight, I know it, I.

It is some meteor that the sun exhaled

To be to thee this night a torchbearer

And light thee on thy way to Mantua.

Therefore stay yet. Thou need’st not to be gone.


In the ballet at the start of Act 3, Romeo gets up and opens a curtain to the left along the back of the stage which lets yellow sunlight in.  Juliet gets up, they dance a little and then she drags the curtain back right, closing it a little.  It was nice, playful, and simple visual that echoed their playful exchange in the play.  


The ballet skips the scene where Juliet mourns Tybalt and the scene where Romeo weeps about his banishment to Friar Lawrence, but incorporates moments of the two characters weeping during their post nuptial dance.  I liked how this was interwoven with a romantic dance;  I feel like it did a good job of gesturing at the complicated emotions both are feeling about the traumatic events of the last few days.  Combining both characters' grieving moments into the same scene has a great narrative economy and lets them be a mix of sorrowful and joyful together which I think bonds them even more tightly. 


One last little example: In the play when Romeo goes to the tomb to find Juliet he sees Tybalt's body and asks for his forgiveness.  Romeo doesn't see Tybalt in the tomb in the ballet, but his remorse is shown earlier right after their fatal duel.  Immediately after striking Tybalt down, Romeo's first instinct is to go to his side, though he's prevented by Benvolio.  When Escalus arrives to proclaim his banishment, Romeo goes to Tybalt, kneels and prays to him, which captures the spirit of the tomb speech.  This is another thing that wouldn't have been necessary to make the main story work, but I appreciated the small touch.  


Ok I lied, one more:  In the very last moments of the ballet, with Romeo and Juliet dead in the foreground, a spotlight comes on to their parents standing in the dark background.   It echoes the opening visual and has the same muted monochrome.  You see the grief stricken Montagues and Capulets slowly approach each other, shake hands and then after a beat, sadly embrace.


I could almost hear the Prince's play ending speech:


A glooming peace this morning with it brings.

The sun for sorrow will not show his head.

Go hence to have more talk of these sad things.

Some shall be pardoned, and some punishèd.

For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.


Musical Tidbits


This probably won't come as a shock but the music is really excellent.  I suppose if the score wasn't great it wouldn't still be around after almost a hundred years.  It's worth a listen even apart from the ballet.  Some things I thought were interesting:


I like that the first notes of the ballot, a poignant and romantic melody, actually ends up being the music Romeo and Juliet dance their last goodbye to.  It gives it a kind of retroactive sadness, like the opening salvo of the score was about love, but also loss.  The choreography in the tomb scene put the moment Romeo stabs Paris underneath a brief restatement of this melody which was interesting.  I think Romeo's last dance with Juliet's "corpse" also incorporated strains of it, too. 


It was interesting how the Dance of the Knights music at the Capulet ball, the dark almost oppressive march that the partygoers do their prescriptive dance to, becomes the musical shorthand for "The Capulets are being jerks," popping up again when Tybalt is waving a sword around and when Old Capulet threatens Juliet when she refuses to marry Paris.  


I also like how the choreography and music work together in the scene where the Nurse says that Juliet should abandon Romeo and marry Paris.  The music here is a reprise of the melody used for for Juliet and the Nurse's first playful interaction.  That first scene was played as comic, and having the music repeat in this new definitely not-comic context makes the Nurse's actions feel like the betrayal it is in the play.  Juliet wants her Nurse to have her back, to recreate their earlier affectionate dynamic.  But it doesn't work and she's alone.


Last thing: Act 2 has a plaza scene with traveling musicians playing mandolins!  (Hey that's the name of the blog!)  Mercutio takes one of the mandolins out of the musician's hands and plays it, which potentially explains the slight dissonance of the chords.  ...I'm a better mandolin player than Mercutio is what I'm saying. He does have the edge on me with sword proficiency but I have now outlasted him by 400 years and also he's fictional.   

The score calls for mandolins, but I don't think there actually were any in the performance.  (womp womp) None were listed in the list of Philharmonic players, and I think maybe it was done with the keyboard or harp.  


Gallimaufry 


  • I like in the formal group dance after Romeo and Juliet have met that they touch hands when they pass each other and how Romeo later runs over and swaps places with her official partner.  Youthful romantic exuberance writ large.

  • Tybalt is more pugnacious in this version.  At the ball he actually scuffles with Romeo before Old Capulet restrains him which amplifies their personal conflict.  He also crosses swords with Mercutio before Romeo even shows up.  Having said that, I like that when he's trying to get Juliet away from Romeo, he doesn't manhandle her or yank her away.  He just "talks" to her.  It comes across as misguided affection, not possessiveness. 

  • I really liked in the wedding scene how as soon as Juliet knelt next to Romeo, before the service started, they hurriedly leaned in to kiss each other and Friar Lawrence turned around gave them a gesture that read as "Come on, guys, you can wait like 5 minutes."  It was cute and captured the spirit of Friar Lawrence's Act 2, scene 3 line "Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast."

  • In every ballet I see I decide if there's part I think I could do.  There usually is one and it's always a person who either just stands there or just walks very slowly across the stage.  It's Prince Escalus in this one.  (Though I undoubtedly lack the gravitas) 


Conclusion


This was very good and a really interesting adaptation.  It's amazing how well Shakespeare can port over to the extremely different medium of ballet when in the hands of skilled adapters.  Hats off to everyone involved.


I'd make my usual joke of "You should go back and time and see it" but I think I'll instead say to check out Orlando Ballet's upcoming season and see if anything tickles your fancy.  (Personally, I'm really looking forward to Giselle which I saw a few years ago and really enjoyed.)


Keep dancing


-m

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