This ‘Romeo’ a Tragedy All the Way

Many choreographers have taken a stab at “Romeo and Juliet,” but few have wounded it as seriously as Tiit Harms, whose production was presented by the Bordeaux Opera Ballet over the weekend at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. The Estonian dance-maker’s pedestrian handling of classical ballet and his flawed dramatic staging kept the work from ascending into the rhapsodic heights and powerfully eerie corners of Prokofiev’s lush score.

The evening wasn’t aided by the threadbare sets--consisting mostly of black draperies and a low faux-brick wall--or the unfortunately designed assortment of velvet, brocade and chiffon costumes.

The Bordeaux company, directed by former Paris Opera star and Nureyev protegeCharles Jude (who danced the role of Romeo Friday), often looked less than crisp both technically and dramatically.

In the balcony scene, Juliet (a sweetly bland Helene Ballon) paces on the almost ever-present low wall at the back of the stage, while Jude as Romeo strikes poses and does a few out-of-place jazzy slides. They dance “at” each other through much of the music that usually accompanies a glorious encounter, and even when they come together, there is no melting of one phrase into another, but more of a stringing together of classroom steps.

Their death scene was agony in more ways than one. Then the capper to a bathetic finale: a sea of Capulets and Montagues waving candles in the dark as if they were at a rock concert, while a smiling Romeo and Juliet appeared in a spotlighted apotheosis. Happy at last? Actually, Romeo and Juliet were never in need of so much help.