Dance: Rival Romeos HIT THE ROAD

Montague and Capulet. John Cranko and Sir Kenneth MacMillan. The Joffrey Ballet and American Ballet Theater. Verona and Washington, D.C. Romeo and Juliet.

The paths of ballet companies are apparently no less star-crossed than those of lovers. Despite the fairly plentiful literature of full-length works available, both A.B.T. and Joffrey are staging expensive, opulent productions & based on Shakespeare’s tragedy and set to Sergei Prokofiev’s marvelous score. The Joffrey version premiered in Washington last Dec. 12, and A.B.T.’s followed it into the Kennedy Center last week.

There are sound reasons for such a project. Full-length ballets do better at the box office than evenings of shorter pieces. The Joffrey, never a company in robust financial health, turned naturally to the work of the late John Cranko because the Joffrey had success when it staged his Taming of the Shrew. Similarly, A.B.T. went to MacMillan, who signed on five months ago as “artistic associate” to Artistic Director Mikhail Baryshnikov. Each organization claimed ignorance of the other’s plans until it was too late to change them. The result is that audiences in Washington, Los Angeles and New York City will have their choice of Romeos between now and May and that nationwide there will be several opportunities to see one or both in the next few seasons.

It would not be a serious mistake to buy tickets to either Romeo, but A.B.T. has the stronger ballet and the superior staging. Both productions are almost ostentatiously grand. In neither is there a hint that Shakespeare set his story during a heat wave; the ladies are swathed in pounds of velvet, silk and gilt. But Designer Nicholas Georgiadis puts on a more magnificent ball in A.B.T.’s $900,000 show, and his Juliet is exquisitely costumed.

Both versions are strongly influenced by the 1940 Kirov production by Leonid Lavrovsky, who worked closely with Prokofiev. This is the composer’s best ballet music: rich, copiously dramatic, with a sunny spiritual radiance in the love scenes. Cranko set it first for the ballet of La Scala in 1958 and four years later for his own fledgling troupe, the Stuttgart Ballet. He was able to show off his inexperienced dancers without exposing their deficiencies with anything too intricate. That approach well suits the Joffrey youngsters, whose average age is 22.

Cranko’s Romeo is nearly as much a theater piece as a ballet. The second act, with its clowns and gypsies and with its great duel scene, is easily the best, and the Joffrey performs it with sweep and charging bravura. Elsewhere there are difficulties, some of which should disappear as the company settles into the work. Right now the dancers have absurd ideas of rich life in the Renaissance. The men strut and pose, the ladies arch their backs so radically that they look poised for a back flip. An exception is Gerel Hilding, whose Tybalt has genuine authority. Perhaps unwittingly, Stuttgart Choreologist Georgette Tsinguirides, who set the ballet on the Joffrey, made the Montagues the good guys and the Capulets the swine: for instance, at the end of the first-act ball, Lord Capulet’s decision to spare the gate-crashing Romeo from Tybalt’s outrage is scarcely indicated. As Juliet and her Romeo, Patricia Miller and James Canfield both lack spirit and flair, but let the music carry them along.

MacMillan’s version, premiered in 1965 by Britain’s Royal Ballet, is the more mature and complex work, stronger in both its choreography and its treatment of the emotional forces that unleash the tragedy. He was of course working with excellent dancers who had grown up in the tradition of story ballets, just as A.B.T.’s dancers are more seasoned and technically superior to the Joffrey’s.

Telling stories may, in fact, be MacMillan’s great skill as a choreographer. He consistently makes astute psychological choices. There are at least eight strong roles in this Romeo, and no empty rhetorical flourishes like those that blur Cranko’s characterizations, particularly of Juliet.

On opening night there were a few frazzled nerves among the younger players. It was A.B.T.’s roster of oldtimers who came through to mold the dramatic details: Associate Director John Taras as a clear, serene Friar Laurence, Ballet Mistress Georgina Parkinson as a properly frantic Lady Capulet, Regisseur Susan Jones, heavily swaddled in fabric, as a benign, gullible Nurse. MacMillan gambled somewhat by casting Robert La Fosse and Leslie Browne as Romeo and Juliet. Browne’s Juliet, spirited and resourceful from the start, was beautifully and boldly danced. La Fosse had more trouble. He is a splendid young dancer who acts as if he would like to concentrate on dancing alone. Only in the tomb scene did he give a strong portrayal of passion. In the coming months several other couples will take the roles, including perhaps Natalia Makarova partnered by Kevin McKenzie. Baryshnikov himself may possibly do a few Romeos. By then the production is sure to be more idiomatic and less solemnly styled in the conservative Royal tradition. A.B.T. could bring just a touch more Broadway to the streets of Verona.