Dance : San Francisco Opens New ‘Romeo, Juliet’

“Romeo and Juliet” ballets are often created as milestones in a company’s history, and no company has courted Shakespeare’s star-cross’d lovers with more momentous results than San Francisco Ballet.

In 1938, Willam Christensen choreographed the very first “Romeo” in America for the struggling young Bay Area ensemble. In 1976, the Michael Smuin version rescued SFB from imminent financial collapse by offering a popular statement of youthful vitality. And, just last week, current artistic director Helgi Tomasson launched an opulent $900,000 production clearly intended to confirm the company’s growing international status.

Designed by Jens-Jacob Worsaae, the Tomasson “Romeo and Juliet” is a High Renaissance spectacle as severely stylized as classical ballet itself. Underscale in the exterior scenes, oversized in the interiors, Worsaae’s ornate Verona exudes theatrical artifice, just as the lightweight, glittering orange and black apparel that nearly everyone wears enforces a sense of imposed elegance.

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Unfortunately, the unreality of the physical production not only clashes with the raw emotions in the inescapable, overrated Prokofiev score but minimizes the difference between families at the heart of the story. This is a Verona in which wearing green seems more forbidden than any Montague-Capulet liaison--where all the peasants, nobles, soldiers, clergy and even harlots form one holistic bi-chromatic corps de ballet.

Credited to Tomasson and Marty Pistone, the fight scenes incorporate the production’s biggest scenic innovation: an overhead bridge that allows Juliet to watch key moments in the drama (the death of Tybalt, for instance). However, Tomasson’s formal choreography also emphasizes vertical space, deliberately working against the weight of the music through a constant use of leaps, bounds and (in the love duets) high lifts.

This buoyant virtuosity is the closest he comes to making his “Romeo and Juliet” original or even distinctive in movement terms. Throughout, the dances remain tasteful and intelligently shaped, but without imagination or dramatic fire. Moreover, a series of mistimed gestures and reactions blur major dramatic moments--the “plague on both your houses” curse from the dying Mercutio, for example.

Denis de Coteau leads the company orchestra in a restrained yet urgent performance of the score, but the production as a whole quickly becomes a display of what money can buy rather than what the art of ballet can reveal or enhance in Shakespearean tragedy.

The Saturday-night cast at War Memorial Opera House featured lovers familiar to Los Angeles balletomanes: Tina LeBlanc, a former Joffrey Ballet Juliet (in the John Cranko version) and David Palmer, a former Joffrey Mercutio appearing as a SFB guest due to the large number of company injuries. Both proved charming and accomplished without ever suggesting that their characters’ feelings had deepened significantly after their accidental meeting at the ball. It should be noted, however, that LeBlanc, Palmer and nearly all their colleagues were dancing this new version for the first time.

Christopher Stowell managed to match spectacular bravura with sharply defined character insights as Mercutio and Jorge Esquivel (once the super-hero of Cuban ballet) made Tybalt the most primal threat imaginable.

Anita Paciotti bumbled effectively as the Nurse and Eric Wolfram made an unusually youthful, sympathetic Friar Laurence. Rodolphe Cassand and Paul Gibson contributed skillful performances of Paris and Benvolio, while Julia Adam and Katita Waldo kept the inevitable marketplace Harlots believably high-spirited.

Lord and Lady Capulet appeared to have no real relationship with their daughter, and Val Caniparoli seemed merely brisk in the former role, Kathleen Mitchell strangely stiff in the latter. Marty Pistone made no effect whatsoever as the Prince of Verona.

Performances of various casts will continue in repertory through May 1.