The Bolshoi’s Romeos and Juliets Lend Varied Hues to Their Roles

Twice in Leonid Lavrovsky’s three-act “Romeo and Juliet” ballet comes a celebrated passage in which Romeo stands with his back to the audience and lifts Juliet straight up, high above him, in an act of devotion. Virtually kneeling on his shoulders while facing us and looking down at him, Juliet stretches out her arms in benediction, responding to the thrill of first love.

Three Bolshoi Ballet Juliets expressed their feelings in the moonstruck body-sculpture of that passage during weekend performances at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, each opening her arms for a different purpose.

To Galina Stepanenko on Saturday afternoon, the gesture seemed to represent Juliet’s solemn pledge of her love and to Inna Petrova on Saturday night a statement of her overwhelming happiness. But to Nina Ananiashvili on Friday it conveyed much, much more: a love that started with Romeo and then expanded to encompass the whole audience and everything beyond.

It was a deeply Shakespearean moment, fully catching the eloquence and simplicity of Juliet’s great discovery in the play:

“My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite.”

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A passionate Juliet is rare enough in a ballet world dominated by technique for technique’s sake; a truly profound one is worth honoring in marble, and Ananiashvili was both. From the playful lightness of her opening scene with the Nurse to an act of suicide desperately undertaken to end her agony over Romeo’s death, her characterization revealed layers of training, coaching and interpretive originality--plus a dimension of Russian soul--that more contemporary ballet audiences and ballet dancers need to see.

Certainly her Romeo (the intense Andrei Uvarov) and Stepanenko’s (the stolid Dmitri Belogolovtsev) both relied on generalized male-ingenue stereotypes, while even the more rounded portrayal of Sergei Filin never reached tragic stature. Moreover, Stepanenko’s Juliet offered a majestic lyricism all its own, but no sense of youthful vulnerability, and Petrova’s ricocheted from overplayed girlishness early on to a promising but very small-scaled dramatic power in the final scenes.

Indeed, a company that once stood unchallenged for raw emotionalism looked strangely cautious and soft over the weekend--spirited, certainly, but lightweight, reserving the scenery-chewing for its mime artists: Evgenia Volochkova as the Nurse, Andrei Sitnikov and Maria Volodina as Lord and Lady Capulet, etc.

The dancing, alas, remained largely freeze-dried, with the exceptions noted above and Vladimir Moiseyev’s volcanic Tybalt twice on Saturday. In the best contemporary international style, the sprightly Mercutio of Yan Godovsky and the narcissistic Paris of Alexei Barsegyan stayed deft, tasteful, understated--qualities perfect for Frederick Ashton’s delicately poetic “Romeo and Juliet,” but not this blood-and-thunder Lavrovsky version, a Bolshoi specialty since 1946.

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Created for the Kirov Ballet six years earlier, and set in an impossibly ornate high-Renaissance world designed by Pyotr Williams, this is the “Romeo and Juliet” that put Sergei Prokofiev’s score on the map and inspired the Ashton, Cranko, MacMillan and other editions. Complete and unabridged, it runs 200 minutes and must be approached as a genuine period piece, the way we’d look at a movie epic from the 1940s.

That alone makes it a daring anomaly in contemporary classicism: an old ballet allowed to show its age. It’s even allowed to show its Communist-era politics: Tybalt for instance, gets pleasure from abusing a worker--not just another sword-wielding Montague but a worker--which means, of course, that he’s not merely hotblooded but downright evil.

Currently, the international ballet repertory is full of fake antiques--works that may have originated in the distant past but have been so extensively edited, refocused, spiced with interpolated showpieces and pumped up with contemporary technique that they’d be unrecognizable to the credited, long-dead choreographers.

So a 1940 relic featuring hours of pantomime and character dance--along with a larger-than-life, quasi-operatic style of presentation--disturbs and affronts the classically obsessed, dance-dance-dance breed of balletomane.

But should we re-cut early Hitchcock classics to make them look like John Woo? That’s pretty much what the Kirov did when it presented its radically time-compressed performances of the Lavrovsky “R&J;” in Orange County eight years ago. And it didn’t work, not nearly. The Bolshoi knows better, even if its evolving classical style makes it hard to get back to the unstinting veristic grandeur necessary to keep this particular work fully alive.

But Ananiashvili points the way, proving that Lavrovsky’s innovative blend of pantomime, character dance, processional movement, gymnastic ploys and classical steps (all present in the balcony scene alone, for example) can be projected convincingly, at full power, without the dancer looking remotely old-fashioned.

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Besides its other pleasures, the “Romeo and Juliet” weekend at the Pavilion reconfirmed the remarkable expertise of conductor Alexander Sotnikov, an artist capable of not only serving individual dancers, but of nudging the Pacific Symphony ever higher, day by day, and helping camouflage the endless repetitions that Prokofiev resorted to when Russian authorities ordered him to expand his score to its present length.

Among those dancers not previously mentioned, Maria Allash deserves credit for her exceptionally warm and gracious dancing as Juliet’s friend in both of the Saturday performances, opposite the promising Ilya Ryzhakov. Maria Alexandrova executed the role neatly on Friday with the same partner. The inevitable jumping but jestless Jester role fell to the deft Denis Medvedev at the two evening performances, the rather crude Kirill Shulepov at the matinee. Alexei Loparevich played Friar Laurence three times with the same bland dignity.

* Bolshoi Ballet, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. “Don Quixote”: Tuesday through Thursday, 7:30 p.m. “Romeo and Juliet”: Friday, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, 1:30 and 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. $20-$85. (714) 556-ARTS.