TV Reviews : ‘Romeos’ Puts Clever Spin on Dance Classic

Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” reverberates through Western culture in adaptations for symphony orchestra, opera, ballet, popular theater and motion pictures. Recognizing that audiences don’t need another linear retelling, an intriguing 1990 Canadian dance-video titled “Romeos and Juliets” presents a collage of interpretations.

Scheduled today at 4 p.m. on Bravo cable, the hourlong telecast offers four Romeos, six Juliets plus other multiple Montagues and Capulets in sequences choreographed to a suite from Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet score.

Writer-director Barbara Willis Sweete periodically shows the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and conductor Charles Dutoit strikingly deployed in a studio with the dancers serving as an audience for the star-cross’d vignettes. This structural device provides the unity deliberately bypassed in the contrasting dance episodes.

The most exciting, inventive choreography comes in James Kudelka’s version of the Bedroom Scene--a passionate, contemporary duet with Romeo and Juliet dancing barefoot in their underwear. (For once, Juliet doesn’t wear toe shoes to bed on her wedding night.)

David Earle of Toronto Dance Theatre is the choreographer most frequently represented, with contributions ranging from a conventionally lyric Balcony Scene to a stylized, gladiatorial depiction of the conflict between Montagues and Capulets using suitably bombastic music from the Ball Scene.

Romeo and Juliet emerge as sacrificial victims here, an idea Earle expresses elsewhere by casting children as Juliet and Paris in the scene where their engagement is arranged. Earle himself appears as Lord Capulet in a doggedly mime-oriented passage of family conflict credited to Marshall Pynkoski and Jeannette Zingg of Opera Atelier.

Strongly performed and fluidly photographed, “Romeos and Juliets” won the Press Prize at the Grand Prize International Video Dance festival in Paris last December. Its U.S. premiere today marks the first offering in Bravo’s “Texaco Performing Arts Showcase.”