'Romeo and Juliet' at Clowes: Star-crossed lovers in a star-favored production

 

now and then

there is a person born

who is so unlucky

that he runs into accidents

which started out to happen

to somebody else

In the golden age of newspapers last century, Don Marquis' inimitable lower-case cockroach Archy exuded bug wisdom in free verse. The insight above can be applied to the particular situation of Romeo in Shakespeare's romantic tragedy, the basis of the ballet "Romeo and Juliet." A spectacular new production debuted Friday night at Clowes Hall in the first of three performances marking an unprecedented collaboration of Indianapolis Ballet and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.

What about Juliet? Well, she also runs into accidents, the product of her forbidden love across the formidable barrier of a family feud. Feuds, after all, are "accidents which started out to happen to somebody else." But her fate is bound up in the patriarchy of the Renaissance, with gender roles rather more restrictive on women than they are today. 

The citizens of Renaissance Verona celebrate the Feast of All Souls

So, while Romeo is "fortune's fool," as he complains to Friar Laurence, Juliet has to direct her ardor for a stipulated foe through adamantine restrictions. Pre-Juliet, her lover exercises the male privilege to explore romantic feelings and indulge in such whims as crashing a party at his enemy's house. Juliet has to earn her own freedom, responding to passion with the courage to defy her family's notion of honor and nubile women's duties.

Such contrasting tasks of the title characters get astonishing forms of expression through dance, especially thanks to Septime Webre's choreography to Sergei Prokofiev's scintillating score. The gestation of the most famous love affair in Western performing arts, as well as its progress toward tragedy, could hardly have been better illuminated than it was in the performances of Yoshiko Kamikusa and Trevor PinterParsons on opening night.

The tentative attraction of the couple at the Capulets' masked ball burgeons against the risks. Kinsman Tybalt is the self-appointed feud enforcer, fierce from his initial appearance in Mark-David Bloodgood's portrayal, and a balletic counterweight to Romeo and Juliet. Juliet's parents, staunch and self-possessed as danced by Nicholas Bentz and Jessica Miller, uphold the presumed justice of their social positions and the nuptial decision they are about to impose on their restive daughter.  

The tension and dramatic contrasts are ratcheted up further in the Gavotte that climaxes the scene. The music is representative of Prokofiev's genius in characterizing relationships en masse and individually alike. The ISO, under the insightful direction of Jack Everly, complemented the angularity and formality of Webre's ensemble choreography with some spiky phrasing that highlighted the ancient dance form Prokofiev makes his own here and converts to dramatic significance.

Tybalt and Romeo clash swords in fight with fatal consequences.

That's followed by the Balcony Scene, which juxtaposes the force of fresh love against the rigid "family values" of the Capulets. (A clear indication at the party that Lady Capulet has something going on the side with Tybalt helps explain her excessive display of grief upon his killing, the moment that turns Romeo into fortune's fool.)

Kamikusa and PinterParsons displayed a breathtaking partnership here through two distinct phases of the young lovers' shared passion. At first, movement that folds, rises and sinks in mutual collapses, seeming to dispel feud-fed anxiety, wordlessly proclaims: "From now on, my life depends on you."  That yields to a celebration of this commitment, a transformation of the pas de deux toward exhilaration. There was an astonishing series of lifts that skyrocketed toward a world beyond unlucky accidents. Of course, we know that will not be their world for long.

Where that world blazes up is in the couple's painfully brief honeymoon, after Friar Laurence has married them, with Romeo's banishment from Verona impending. The bed scene was another triumph in Kamikusa and PinterParsons' performance Friday night. It was without a touch of grossness yet fully expressive of the marriage's consummation. 

And it was another place where dance can exceed spoken theater, even when the words sacrificed are Shakespeare's. Here's a story: long ago as a graduate student of Harvard, I took a Shakespeare course from the esteemed Harry Levin, one of the literature faculty's top stars. In class, a fellow student posed the question: Can we see in the way Romeo and Juliet now talk to each other that they have become sexually intimate? Levin answered in a way that conceded the student's point, but he dodged it by interpreting the lovers' pedantic argument over whether they are hearing the lark or the nightingale as an  example of the epithalamium, a formal wedding song from ancient Greece that Sir Philip Sidney domesticated for the English about 1580. 

When the play is staged, the director has to include a fair amount of groping and caressing to underline the dialogue's significance. In the ballet, movement speaks volumes. In vulgar terms, Romeo and Juliet are debating bird song as a way of wondering "Can we get it on one more time before Romeo has to leave?" In ballet, controlled intensity and imaginative technical aplomb get the message across. (Those qualities would take on the transfiguration of mortal pathos in the final scene, confirming yet another aspect of this partnership's excellence.) 

The choreographer's frankness about erotic matters is refreshingly close to Shakespeare in other scenes. The bawdy teasing of Juliet's nurse (Journie Kalous, in a multifaceted performance) indulged in by Mercutio and Benvolio is given free play in controlled movement and what the Elizabethans called "ropery."  Furthermore, in the early scenes Romeo's past love life is lent the significance of a young man's waywardness.

More indicative of how there is always a world elsewhere beyond even the luckiest lovers was mastery of the crowd scenes. The street comes alive at the start before the bloody continuation of the feud blots the positive Veronese vitality. And as the second act begins, Victoria Lyras' inspired costuming moves up another level of excellence in the merrymaking of the Feast of All Souls. The action follows suit, even as the tragedy approaches inexorably. The hints of lives unconnected to a stubborn feud get lively display, from the spirited gamboling of children to gossiping nuns to a trio of commedia dell'arte performers. In that well-coordinated troupe of three, Camilo Santiesteban was supremely effective as Harlequin, acrobatically clownish with a kind of boy-next-door appeal that reminded me of Donald O'Connor.

When it comes to comedy expressed in dance, however, the palm goes to William Robinson as the blithe but somehow doom-eager Mercutio. His performance was laden with mockery of more straitlaced characters (which means practically everybody else). He planted brief kisses on anyone, including nearby maidens while dueling with Tybalt. Mercutio's famous line about the severity of his wound— "'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door" — was suggested through a gestural insouciance and high-spirited bravado in Robinson's performance. No detail in his virtuosity went for nought.

Curtain call: William Robinson, Jack Everly, Victoria Lyras, Trevor PinterParsons, Yoshiko Kamikusa

Other roles worth mentioning for their supportive prominence include Benvolio, a "good egg" type who, as danced by Eli Diersing, was never in competition with Mercutio but was clearly the sort of man welcome by his peers in adventures both blithe and purposeful. As for Paris, the unfortunate but favored suitor of Juliet, Logan O'Neal danced the role with a gentlemanly air and just a trace of the twit about him (not at the Monty Python extreme of twitness, fortunately).  

One further word on how Lord Capulet rises to the heights of paternal indignation in Bentz's performance. Webre shows again how his choreography picks up hints from Shakespeare's language: One of Capulet's angry lines is "My fingers itch!"  I remember that from when I played the role in high school (nondancing, of course). Bentz displayed the most eloquent clawing fingers in this scene, ready as the thwarted dad was to throttle his formerly beloved daughter. This brief but crucial moment felt typical of the attention to detail this production displays. 

Sets and lighting by David Higgins and David Lapham, respectively, added perspective and hints of authenticity to the action, yet never threatened to overwhelm the gorgeously costumed dancing figures. Finally, how wonderful that Jack Everly, as he heads toward retirement as the ISO's principal pops conductor, gets the opportunity to draw upon his impressive credentials as a ballet conductor to make the instrumental support for the dancing, and its coordination with it, so effective. 

[Photo credits: Indianapolis Ballet; curtain call: Tom Russo, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra]