Kirov Finds Unsentimental Heart Of Soviet-Era 'Romeo and Juliet'

If it's grand-scale love you crave -- and beauty, sweetness and heartache enough to drive away whatever else is on your mind -- the Kirov Ballet's "Romeo and Juliet" offers it all. It's as hopeful and cruel as that love affair you once had, the one that changed your life, only it's set to better music.

Music was the key to this production, which opened Tuesday night and continues at the Kennedy Center Opera House through Sunday afternoon. The Kirov performs the version that Leonid Lavrovsky created for the troupe in 1940 to the majestic Prokofiev score, and even though the Opera House Orchestra muddied it up at several key moments, the music comes through with unaccustomed force. You hear it -- and focus on it -- exceptionally clearly in this production, as opposed to, say, in the Bolshoi Ballet's lengthier, more textured account of the same choreography (performed here in 2000), or Kenneth MacMillan's fevered, lusty version, occasionally on view from American Ballet Theatre. Here, the clear, open style of the dancing allows Prokofiev's music to deliver its own energy and heat.

Additionally, those smart Kirov dancers know they don't have to screw their faces up to convey the emotional stress. It's already there in the music, whistling around them like gathering winds. With Tuesday's cast -- perhaps versed in Stanislavsky-type naturalism -- there was no wrinkly-brow "acting," but distinct emotional connections.

Just as rewardingly, this production, with its energetic pacing and dramatic pull, brings you quickly to the heart of the story. On opening night, that heart pulsed with extra fervor through the efforts of a young, little-known dancer named Evgenya Obraztsova, who turns 23 today. Her Juliet combined childlike innocence and spontaneity with a mature sense of scale. Leaps and turns flew out of her, yet she didn't smudge a step. Her emotional clarity and the quality of her dancing -- light and silky, rather than forceful -- suited the soft tone of this ballet.

As Romeo, Andrian Fadeyev matched Obraztsova's ease, with his own natural elegance and fluid style. He was tender and naive, rather than aggressively passionate, and wholesome down to his toes. He was such a good guy, in fact, that in his duel with Juliet's cousin Tybalt (Dmitry Pykhachev) he threw away one of his own swords when his opponent lost a weapon.

That moment fit in with a curious distinction that this production drew between the Capulet family, to which Juliet and Tybalt belonged, and the rest of Verona. Far from being refined and correct, as they are usually depicted, the Capulets were a brash, nasty lot, more Mafia than nobility. Juliet's father (Vladimir Ponomarev) wore a permanent sneer and a big, god-awful wig, which didn't seem to discourage him from smooching with various partners at his ball. (Smooching was going on all around him, besides.) Tybalt had screaming orange hair and looked like a punk, garbed in clashing colors. Paris, Juliet's intended, was a narcissistic twit.

In contrast, Fadeyev's Romeo was modest and well mannered. He's a perfect match for Obraztsova's Juliet, not just because the story is scripted that way but because so many details of the production make their union logical.

This production showcased a noticeably and agreeably nuanced Kirov; it seems to have blunted the razor's edge that past visits have highlighted, where physical excitement has often supplanted movement quality.

Yet despite all the aching poignancy and sympathy contributed by the dancers, this "Romeo and Juliet" is not a gentle tale. Yes, you could say the two ill-fated lovers bring about a reconciliation of their warring families at the end, as Messrs. Capulet and Montague embrace over the bodies of their dead children. But this was clearly an afterthought here; if you blinked, you missed it, and then the curtain fell.

There's little time spent on the "love triumphs over all" message that infuses the Shakespearean source material. In fact, there's no triumph here. The hasty dismissal of the hug, and the focus on the young bodies sprawled on the marble steps of Juliet's bier, teaches instead a harsh lesson: Look what happens to you if you buck the system, if you defy your parents (substitute Stalin here -- we're talking 1940, after all) and try to outwit them. You wind up deader than a chicken Kiev.

Interestingly, an "original" version of the Prokofiev score has apparently been unearthed in Moscow, with the happy ending -- love's triumph -- that the composer was ultimately prevented by Soviet officials from performing, according to the Mark Morris Dance Group. Morris announced yesterday that he is working on his own version of the ballet. It will be accompanied by the earlier Prokofiev music and will follow the composer's written instructions.

After the new work's unveiling, slated for Bard College in 2008, will Russian companies like the Kirov reexamine their own versions?

It's hard to say. In the dance of history and art, as in the heart, changes are not so easily made.