By Sarah Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 7, 2008
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.
When Bard College contacted Morrison about a planned Stravinsky festival, he suggested Prokofiev instead. He also suggested bringing in Morris, known for his musical savvy, to create a new dance for the new find, which kicks off the college's seven-week series, titled "Sergey Prokofiev and His World." ("Romeo and Juliet" runs through Wednesday; it will then go on tour.)
Bard wanted a new take on the choreography, something quite different from the cast-of-thousands ballets created by Lavrovsky as well as by the Royal Ballet's Kenneth MacMillan. Both of those productions are great bulging affairs, with villagers milling about tossing fruit at one another, heavy Renaissance costumes and soaring pas de deux. Mindful of the previous ballet -- and even Hollywood -- productions of "Romeo and Juliet," Morris made his small and intimate.
"I wasn't looking to do a big post-Zeffirelli spectacle," said Morris in an interview last week.
But the problem is, Prokofiev wrote nearly three hours of music. And he wrote it for a ballet company; there are all those village-square crowd scenes for showing off your large corps de ballet.
Morris runs a chamber-size modern dance company, slightly enlarged for this production. Still, on the Fisher Center stage with that raucous music -- rhythms careering up and down, low brass booming and the pace quickening -- it looked skimpy. (Allen Moyer designed the abstract set, a backdrop of wooden squares; Martin Pakledinaz created the costumes, combining hoodies and tank tops with long skirts and codpieces.) And the music, in some spots, carried on for pages at a clip, while the dancers repeated sequences of nimble steps. No matter how cleverly crafted it was, we were going nowhere.
So scale was a problem for Morris. But so was emotion. One didn't feel sucked in by the drama. There was no lack of exertion; Verona's citizens, particularly its women, were a zesty, hard-driving lot. Women, in fact, dominated here. Morris cast women as the two most hotheaded bolts of testosterone (complete with bulges in their tights): Romeo's pal Mercutio (Amber Darragh) and Juliet's cousin Tybalt (Julie Worden).
Gender-bending is nothing new for Morris; for years he danced Queen Dido in his gorgeous 1989 account of the Henry Purcell tragedy "Dido and Aeneas." But while the androgynous, smoldering Darragh was entirely convincing, Worden, a delicately built blond beauty, looked like a girl trying to act tough.
As your eye was drawn to Mercutio and to Juliet's nurse (Lauren Grant, to whom Morris gave the loveliest, most lyrical dancing), you felt almost nothing for the titular pair. Juliet, danced on opening night by Fairfax native Rita Donahue, was a much stronger and more inner-directed presence than her Romeo, David Leventhal, who came across as unremarkable and shy. But Don8a8hue was also reticent, brooding, to the point where the love-story moments were among the evening's dullest. The balcony scene? Donahue and Leventhal used great swatches of that sweeping, yearning music to move around minimally and stare at each other.
"It made sense that the music not simply be background to a kind of old-fashioned ballet-style virtuosity," said Leon Botstein, Bard College's president and the conductor of the "new" original Prokofiev, speaking last week. "You need this Prokofiev-like balance between modernity and tradition."
Yet Morris's desire to counteract tradition felt strained. Not in the "morning-after" scene, where a stark-naked Romeo and Juliet roll around in their bed in a sweet and earthy display of uninhibited devotion, truly unbound and fresh. But the strain -- the overthinking -- was apparent in those moments when Prokofiev supplied abundant music and Morris seemed stymied in response.
Morris is one of the finest dance storytellers around, as is clear in his "Dido." But that was an earlier Morris. Lately, Morris has cooled off, his works have become more cerebral. And that approach was not the best match for this music, which, though leaner and less sentimental than the Sovietized version, still conjures an emotional flood.
The evening, however, was not without real-life drama. Death may not have claimed this Romeo and Juliet, but it did manage to intrude upon the production: An hour and a half before the curtain rose on opening night, Morris's mother died in Seattle. She had been ailing for some time; still, by all accounts the timing came as a shock.
The show went on, of course, and Morris gamely went on with all obligations, taking a bow with the dancers and, later, addressing those gathered at a post-performance reception in the college's festive Spiegeltent: "I just want to raise a glass to my today-dead mother, Maxine. My show and all my work is for her."
There was another, happier family connection to note on opening night: Prokofiev's grandson Serge and Serge's two grown daughters had flown in from Paris to see the production. A tall bear of a man, maybe fiftyish, with wire-rimmed glasses and a mop of white hair, Serge Prokofiev, speaking in French after the performance, pronounced the music "great." He also noted that when his grandfather first came to the United States, in 1918, "he said it was not ready for his music. Now, this country does the most for his music. . . . It can serve as an example to the others about how to play the music and not to simply choose the easy road."
And what did he think of the dancing? He smiled, paused. "Ah," he began, exchanging a look with his daughters. "Well, there's a lot that is new, hein?"
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