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Where for art thou, Romeo?
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Bard’s tragic tale of love popping up on TV, movie screens, stages
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By Sid Smith
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Tribune arts critic
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Published October 5, 2003
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As mythical legacies go, theirs is as recognizable as Scrooge, Cinderella and Job: Just utter the words “Romeo and Juliet” to virtually anybody and see instant acknowledgment, often followed by a moony, wistful glare into the distance.
“Star-crossed,” William Shakespeare famously dubbed them, but in the galaxy of literary durability, their stars shine perpetually. Not only are they the focus of one of the Bard’s most popular plays, but they claim ballets, operas, one legendary Broadway musical and a knockoff Fox TV series this season (“Spin”) among their innumerable descendents. Teens in the ’60s heard “Just Like Romeo and Juliet” on top 40 radio, just as the multiplex set enjoyed Baz Luhrmann’s MTV-like movie “Romeo + Juliet” with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in 1996. There’s even a current commercial boasting a 30-second version of the tale enacted on cell phones.
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“It’s a story about love and death, two very popular subjects,” choreographer Kenneth MacMillan drolly put it some years ago. Every season sees some sort of revival or echo, and this fall is no exception. Most notably, the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago is reviving its celebrated version of John Cranko’s sumptuous, full-length “Romeo and Juliet” Wednesday through Oct. 19 at the Auditorium Theatre.
“It’s a story that is so utterly universal and recognizable,” says Michael Pink, whose own ballet version just finished its run as his inaugural offering as new artistic director of the Milwaukee Ballet. “People instantly know they’re going to get a story about a boy and a girl in love who die. If you want to sell something on Valentine’s Day, put their names on it. Like doing `Dracula,’ you know you won’t have to work to get people to know what you’re talking about.
“They’re a brand name as famous as Coca-Cola.”
Familiarity, of course, is only part of the appeal. The story, as Shakespeare shaped it, is both a deeply affecting expression of first love and a pointed, resonant commentary, a rare instance in which the dramatist allowed himself to be unequivocally didactic. Make love, not war, is the message. Although often carefree with the rules of classic Greek unity, most of the time Shakespeare’s title tragic characters — Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear and more — exhibit tragic flaws in line with classical tradition.
Progressive play
That makes “Romeo and Juliet,” while maybe not his most mature writing, one of his most progressive: The doomed title characters are innocent, while the flaw can be blamed on society as a whole. All are punished, the Prince — Shakespeare’s stand-in — always tells us at the end, and always we weep for ourselves.
The popularity of the tale in ballet is all the more startling in that the art is completely silent, free of a single word of dialogue. Perversely, the story here comes from an author more celebrated for his language and ideas than his plots, which he invariably borrowed, this one included. Of all his stories, “Romeo and Juliet,” though, is a model of clarity as it telegraphs its sweeping tale of passion, combat and tragedy, delicious fodder for choreographers as varied as MacMillan, Frederick Ashton, Jerome Robbins and Cranko.
The latter’s version, first stage in Germany in 1962 and added to the Joffrey repertoire in 1984, is unquestionably one of the best. Cranko’s all-too-brief life is fascinating and tragic in itself. Born in South Africa, he studied and performed in London before becoming artistic director of Germany’s Stuttgart Ballet, which he made one of the more celebrated of its time. He went against the grain of mid-20th Century modernism by focusing on the seemingly tired, classical full-length, invigorating the form with such masterpieces as this one and “The Taming of the Shrew,” revived by the Joffrey last fall. He died unexpectedly from heart trouble on a flight from Philadelphia back to Stuttgart in 1973. He was 45.
Fortunately, he left behind his friend and gifted assistant, Georgette Tsinguirides, one of the gypsies in the original production, today Stuttgart Ballet mistress and, armed with careful notations, keeper of the Cranko flame. She spent more than a month here restaging the classic for the Joffrey.
“It’s about love,” she says of its enduring power, “and love is everything. Without it, there’s no ballet, no life, no anything.
“John loved Shakespeare, he always urged dancers to read Shakespeare when they were dancing adaptations of his work,” Tsinguirides adds. “He particularly loved this work because it was a kind of breakthrough for him and the company. The key is the emotion. Learning the steps is one thing. But the secret is to go beyond that and reach the dancers as people. Then it’s true and real.”
Female perspective
Another curious facet of this myth, one increasingly explored by contemporary artists, is an underlying, subtle female perspective. For centuries, of course, Romeo and Juliet loomed as a balanced couple, a yin and yang of dramatized romance. But ballet is a Western art arguably unique in its roster of women as top characters: “Giselle,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Coppelia” and the swan in “Swan Lake.” The ballerina, in every full-length, is often on equal, if not superior, footing.
That idea of “Romeo and Juliet” as a woman’s story is creeping into dramatic interpretation.
“The more you work on it, the more fascinating Juliet’s character becomes,” says Gary Griffin, the celebrated Chicago director who staged an abridged version for Chicago Shakespeare Theater last spring. “It’s not often played that way. Actresses traditionally hit the ingenue notes. But the story is about her intelligence, her struggles with her family and her need to define herself. She drives a lot of the story.”
That is the theme driving a production by the non-Equity Chicspeare Production Company, Oct. 10-Nov. 9 at Ebenezer Auditorium on the North Side. “We picked the play because ours is an educational program and kids can relate to it,” Ann James, director of the company, explains. “But Shakespeare’s ending says there was never a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo. He mentions her first, and the more you look at the story, you see she’s the driving force, trying to get things done, the balance between Romeo’s world and her own.”
She is the love half of the “make love, not war” formula, in other words, in opposition to Romeo’s heated surrender to revenge.
Whatever the thematics, “Romeo and Juliet” endures, fueled in dance by Sergei Prokofiev’s score, one of ballet’s most perfect, and by timeless truth everywhere.
“I was assistant director for a production in Slovakia, and, while I didn’t understand a word they were saying, I knew what they meant every step of the way,” says Kate Buckley, who’s staging a touring version for Chicago Shakespeare Theater. “Juliet goes from being a girl of 14 to a woman in love, and we can all go back to that time in our lives, to that rebellion against parents, to peer pressure and at least one if not all the elements in this story. I like to say that Shakespeare’s tale is indestructible no matter what you do to it. It’s that experience we’ve all hopefully had, that flash of true love that lasts for a lifetime or an instant.
“That moment of a soul touching a soul.”
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