Morris's 'Romeo': A Bloodless Valentine

For never was a story of more woe
Than Prokofiev's music for "Romeo."

-- A saying among
Kirov dancers in 1939-40

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. -- This time, Juliet wakes up in Romeo's arms -- and there's no quaffing of poison, no suicidal stabbing. But that's not the headline coming out of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College Friday night, where the Mark Morris Dance Group premiered "Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare," accompanied by the original unstained-by-Stalin music by Sergey Prokofiev.

The news is not just that in Prokofiev's first draft -- shelved soon after he composed it in 1935 and recently rediscovered -- the lovers defy their fate and escape Verona together. It's this: Overthink a thing and you can smother it.

I'm not talking about the music, which as performed by the American Symphony Orchestra was edgier, spikier and more emotionally piercing than the later state-approved version. It's as if the conventional treatment has been cleaned and refreshed; much (not all) of the booming is gone and quite a lot of the amplified gushing -- these are all improvex ments. There's a distinctly bracing quality to this "new-old" score.

But the same can't be said for the dancing. For all of Morris's efforts to present something deeply revealing, the choreography and the concept behind it felt overworked and dry.

A love story runs on unexamined passion; it's how Prokofiev birthed "Romeo and Juliet," his first full-length ballet. He wrote it in a creative burst in just five months, telling a story of youthful victory over authority with dissonant clashes of woodwinds and brass, and with intimate, shimmering violins. Then the powers-that-were got hold of it and started complaining -- officials at the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets; the original choreographer, Leonid Lavrovsky; even some of the dancers. There was the hard-to-stomach modernity of it, which ran counter to the preferences of dictator Joseph Stalin, who liked music you could hum.

Five years later, when the ballet was finally performed by the Kirov, the happy ending had been chucked and the whole work had undergone a Soviet-style transformation, emerging bigger, louder, swoonier and more like the conventional three-act ballets of the old-style Russian composers.

That is the music as we've come to know it -- one of Prokofiev's best-known works, and the score of one of the most commonly performed ballets on the planet.

Enter those two great friends of the historical record: serendipity and a deadline. When work on a Prokofiev biography took him to Moscow in 2006, Princeton musicologist Simon Morrison began searching the official archives for the long-lost original "Romeo and Juliet," which was rumored to exist but had never been performed.

There he found Prokofiev's entire piano score, with all the other instruments scribbled into the margins, as was the composer's style.

"The real surprise was (a) the completeness, and (b) how different it was from what's known and loved," said Morrison last week. There were the difficult harmonic passages that had been cut from the final version, including bravura passages for clarinet and English horn that were eventually replaced with easier-to-dance repeats. There were some 20 minutes of never-before-heard music, new dances for Moors, pirates and Syrian girls, and that un-Shakespearean ending. It's not as literal as the lovers telling all Verona to go jump in a lake; rather it suggests they enter a spiritual realm, where love is infinite.