MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : Cast Changes in ‘Romeo’ Provide an Interesting Mix

The final weekend performances of “Romeo and Juliet” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion offered several major casting firsts in the new San Francisco Ballet staging. On Friday, Yuri Posokhov danced as a member of the company for the first time, playing Romeo opposite the previously reviewed Elizabeth Loscavio.

Posokhov had been a fine Romeo in the Bolshoi Ballet production at the Shrine Auditorium four years ago, and his dancing Friday provided plenty of Bolshoi intensity along with the elegance and mastery of expressive detail honed during his seasons with the Royal Danish Ballet.

At once deeply thoughtful and surprisingly spontaneous, his Romeo also offered refined virtuosity and superb partnering: a memorable debut indeed. In contrast, Jeremy Collins provided a generalized wash of feeling and audience-courting, in-your-face bravura on Saturday afternoon, when he danced Romeo opposite Sabina Allemann’s Juliet for the first time.

Both had appeared in Helgi Tomasson’s version with different partners and, beyond the technical mishaps in their Saturday duets, they made a very odd couple. Best known locally as an American Ballet Theatre principal, Collins couldn’t seem to dance in character, but breezed through big jumps and intricate turns, while Allemann (formerly with National Ballet of Canada) gloried in passages of lyric flow.

However, he played Romeo as a reckless airhead swooning over the one girl he can’t have, and she kept emphasizing Juliet’s alarm at how dangerous this love affair could be.

The approaches clashed. Her brooding, curiously prosaic interpretation and his relentlessly flighty one turned the relationship upside down: The ballet became “Romiette and Julio,” star-cross’d in more ways than one.

Under the circumstances, Allemann’s most effective moments of character interaction came in her scenes with the Nurse, a loving woman of homespun practicality as played by Lola de Avila. Emil de Cou conducted on Friday night and Saturday afternoon, leading a forceful, persuasive account of the score on each occasion.