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| Romeo and Juliet |
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| Composer: Prokoviev Music: Romeo and Juliet Choreography: Helgi Tomasson Set Design: Costume Design: |
| At Saturday's opening, Yuan Yuan Tan's unfurling limbs made her guileless Juliet the embodiment of longing. Her interpretation was sweet, though not terribly dimensional; the most satisfying Juliets become women before your eyes, and Tan remained a girl. Yuri Possokhov may no longer be so light of step, but he portrays a Romeo of unwavering ardor.
The other juicy roles are for the supporting men. Tomasson has been playing Pascal Molat and Nicolas Blanc off each other all season; as Mercutio and Benvolio, they form an irresistible tag team. Blanc was suave, lingering on top of pirouettes with ease. Molat was the consummate cad, facing down Damian Smith's smoldering Tybalt with masterful comic timing. The women have more thankless assignments. Pauli Magierek and Amanda Schull were lusty harlots, while Elizabeth Miner turned cute cartwheels as an acrobat./ Review |
| Tomasson evidently studied the major versions of Romeo & Juliet (Lavrovsky's 1940 setting, John Cranko's, Kenneth MacMillan's) before setting to work. He clarified a few plot obscurities; now, for example, we know, what brings Romeo to the crypt at the end. And, Tomasson offers a few cunning observations about the feud of the Capulets and Montagues and how the policy of revenge poisons an entire society. Before the cataclysmic Act 2 finale, you catch two boys duelling with wooden swords. Tomasson also uses the late Jens-Jacob Worsaae's gorgeous Renaissance sets with imagination. The Tybalt-Romeo dust-up spills over onto a bridge and you feel you're in an Errol Flynn movie. In this traditional version, Tomasson's best choreography comes in the post-wedding night pas de deux in Act 3, with its dramatic lifts and carries. Tomasson can't make the morning-after aubade serenade any more interesting than anybody else; and it's too bad that he subscribes to the cliché of Lady Capulet's tearing out of her hair after Tybalt's death, a mad scene which is scarcely justified dramatically. At least, Juliet appears at this point to witness the tragedy. No one has ever equaled the solution to an Act 2 closer devised by Frederick Ashton for his 1955 Royal Danish Ballet version - Romeo alone pondering his fate. But, then, Ashton was an unparalleled poet of movement./ Voice of Dance Review |
| I returned to San Francisco Ballet last night to see Sarah Van Patten as Juliet. She danced opposite Pierre Francois-Vilanoba, and as much as I love Yuri Possokhov and Yuan Yuan Tan in other roles, Van Patten-Vilanoba was the cast to catch. They were so moving and believable, in fact, that I realized that some of the ballet’s shortcomings that I had originally blamed on Helgi Tomasson’s staging were actually due to Tan’s one-note performance. The balcony scene, for instance, such a gush of unabated prettiness on opening night, became an exhilarating mixture of terror and infatuation in Van Patten’s and Vilanoba’s hands. So the potential for emotional depth was already there, in the choreography—it was just waiting for the right interpreters./ Review |
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