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May. 30th, 2025 11:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe Boston Ballet production of Maillot's Romeo et Juliette has turned out to be not only my favorite Boston Ballet production that I've seen so far but also tbh one of my favorite Romeo and Juliets full stop. It is Taking Swings and Making Choices and some of them are very weird but all of them are interesting.
So the program was a little ambiguous on this but I am fairly sure the entire story is taking place in Friar Lawrence's guilt mind palace; we begin with Friar Lawrence (dressed like an Anglican vicar) (or like Paul Bettany in Master and Commander, the bit where wears this outfit) and his two Acolytes and they lift him up in a big crucifixion pose and then he writhes around the stage in agony for a bit before allowing Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio to take the stage for some high jinks.
The high jinks are good. They are very good. Mercutio is all big leg capers and mocking bows and shoulder wiggles. Sometimes they all three of them throw their arms around each other and high kick joyously around the stage. They're all dressed in various light shades of gray and white, and flirting with girls in similarly light colors, and then TYBALT AND THE CAPULETS ARRIVE. They are GOTH and they dress in BLACK and have a retinue of GOTH GIRLS with them and everyone does a lot of West Side Story posturing and facing off with each other as they dance-fight. Tybalt and Mercutio clearly have beef and keep getting up specifically in each other's faces in a sort of homoerotic way [we will come back to this later], and also all the corps girls also face off and posture at each other, which is very fun IMO: this feud is not just a men's game, everyone's all in! But it is all posturing, it is high kicks and mockery and shoving each other around but it's not violent, until another set of people arrive in what look more like uniforms --genarti read this as The Family Retainers and I read this as The Adults -- but either way, for these people, shit is real and they are fighting in a way that is really visually distinct from the way the Teens (Tybalt included) are shoving each other around.
At some point Friar Laurence comes into the background to try to calm things down and nobody listens to him and he does some more writhing in agony. One of the Montagues dies, and Benvolio gets pulled into the Montague line to make up the numbers and has to start doing the adult choreography, which IMO is a really interesting touch, but eventually the rest of Verona gets there and everyone scatters.
Then we get Juliet's introduction, which really doubles down on the idea that this version is interested in the idea of a tragedy about youth and young people navigating an adult world. Juliet is first introduced with the Nurse and it is really cute and funny -- the nurse does a lot of little scurrying hopping steps, and then Juliet leaps in and is teasing her, culminating in Juliet straight up flashing the nurse (not the audience, her back is to us) to show that she is Growing Up and Has Boobs Now. Ji Young Chae is dancing Juliet and doing such an incredible job with this, her Juliet is a weird and funny kid. She Is Thirteen Years Old.
Then Lady Capulet enters in full Black Swan mode to make both Juliet and the Nurse nervous because it's time for: The Party! The Nurse has to physically shove Juliet in there to make her go, and then physically yanks her big fluttery overdress off her to make her show off her slinky party dress, and Juliet is so clearly not just shy but body-shy -- people are looking at her! she's not ready for this! the boobs are new! -- before she starts to get into the dancing and have fun with it, and of course as soon as she does start to get exuberant Lady C is taking her aside to show her proper dance steps and Juliet copies her for ten seconds and then starts sproinging again.
By this point Romeo and the Boys have Infiltrated the party, and are sneaking around like the Pink Panther. Romeo and Rosaline (Rosaline is here to make up the numbers) get into a septet with Juliet and Paris and Lady C and Tybalt, and there's several minutes of really effective tension where Juliet and Romeo are placidly dancing with their assigned partners and then just sort of start noticing each other as their paths cross in the dance, a little bit at first, and then more and more until finally the choreography lets them dance together for a moment, and then are locked in while everyone else keeps fighting to pull them away from each other again. Meanwhile, Mercutio and Benvolio are trying to be helpful by dance-flirting with the Nurse, and Tybalt keeps chasing them all around, and apparently at some point in here Mercutio mockingly kisses Tybalt and I MISSED IT because I was watching the Nurse! who is really good and funny and I don't regret it! AND YET. Anyway. Balcony scene, very cute, first intermission. 'This is so good!' I enthuse to Beth. 'I'm having a good time! I hope it keeps being interesting!' Beth hands me her notebook so I can write down most of what I've just described before I forget about it.
SECOND ACT. We are definitely in Friar L's mind palace now because we start with several Capulets dramatically frozen mid-step on the stage while Friar L does some more agonized writhing around them before finally making a gesture that allows them to continue on with the story. Romeo enthusiastically and charmingly conveys his giddy passions to his friends and then get swept up in the whole corps de ballet gathering to sit on benches for .... church? Well, I initially thought it was church -- going to church is a thing that people are always doing in R & J! -- but instead it turns out to be a CREEPY PUNCH AND JUDY PUPPET SHOW because I guess Maillot has also read The Magicians of Caprona. The puppets do various antics, the corps de ballet enthusiastically cheer (Verona loves puppets!) and Romeo and Mercutio get bored and sneak off, which means that of the main cast only Benvolio is left to watch when the two surviving Punch and Judy puppets demonstrate the whole tragic ending of Romeo and Juliet for the cheering Verona crowd, after which they throw off their puppet heads and capes and turn out to once again be agonized Friar Lawrence and his acolytes. (Beth: "Punch and Judy Oracle at Delphi?")
But Benvolio does not know the puppets were trying to warn him, so Romeo and Mercutio come skipping back, and then the Nurse arrives and they all have a good time doing physical ballet comedy before Romeo runs off to get married to Juliet. MEANWHILE, Tybalt and his goth Capulet crew are sashaying around having a good time, Tybalt with a girl on either arm, when they run into Mercutio and Benvolio. Mercutio is UP in Tybalt's face. He rapidly acquires two girls so he can parody the way that Tybalt is dancing with them. He then acquires the black-clad Tybaltesque Punch-and-Judy puppet and frolics salaciously with it. Benvolio attempts to de-escalate, and then Romeo arrives and attempts to make friends, and every time it seems that de-escalation is about to happen either Tybalt looks over at the girls who were hanging on his arm and is visibly like 'my masculinity!!' or Mercutio gets right back in Tybalt's face again.
There are no swords; no one has swords. Mercutio has his puppet, and then picks up some kind of stick (I couldn't see exactly what this was, but definitely not a sword) and Tybalt gets hold of it and takes a swing at Romeo, and Romeo ducks, and Tybalt hits Mercutio, and Mercutio goes down.
And Tybalt is in shock. He's holding out his hands and shaking. It is so clear that he didn't mean to kill Mercutio, or perhaps indeed anyone. Really everyone on stage is in shock, the whole corps is Panicking, there's a little knot of ballerinas down around Mercutio's body and everyone else is fighting with each other, and Tybalt and Romeo kind of go through the motions of the kind of posturing and 'come fight me' that they've done in the past but it is so clear that everything is different now. Romeo pursues Tybalt through the brawling corps -- I actually lost sight of them for several moments, they're in the back sort of pursuing each other behind everyone else -- and then Tybalt is running up a ramp above the rest of the corps and Romeo is running after him with a scarf, and then Romeo tackles Tybalt and STRANGLES HIM WITH A SCARF. Tybalt tries to fend him off with weaker and weaker movements. It takes several minutes. At any point Romeo could decide to stop, and he does not.
Then Friar Lawrence once more comes back to be agonized, only to be immediately out-agonized by Lady C, who throws herself furiously around the stage while Romeo staggers off.
Second intermission! Much shorter. Beth gives me her notebook back. I have time to scribble 'PUPPET ORACLE AT DELPHI?' and 'ROMEO STRAIGHT UP MURDERED HIM???' and then we're back in it.
The third act is Juliet's act. Tour de force. The post-murder Romeo and Juliet pas de deux is of course great but Beth and I agreed afterwards that it was the only time we were very slightly less than one hundred percent riveted, mostly because it was all sort of what we expected to be happening, though we did get a very cute bit of 'Juliet attempting to hide Romeo from the nurse' comedy to prove to us that not all joy died with Mercutio. Here's the nurse! She loves Juliet and she's still funny!
And then Romeo flees and Lady C brings in Paris. Juliet does not want to meet Paris. She does not want Paris to kiss her, which she does. She does not want Paris to look at her, which he does -- and then the nurse, Juliet's funny nurse who loves her, yanks away her overdress again and exposes Juliet in her nightgown for Paris to look at while Juliet wraps her arms around herself with body language that really clearly conveys 'I feel naked and I'm embarrassed and scared'. She hates this! I hate this! but also I love that they did it, and that this production lets Juliet's relationship with her nurse be important and complicated, that it gives huge thematic weight to this betrayal, which is also something that the nurse doesn't really have a choice about because of her position.
Juliet fights with Lady C; then she fights with the nurse. Then Friar Lawrence writhes in and gives her the poison, and we get to see the nurse discovering her, after they've had their fight, and the nurse is doing her funny little quick steps in to be like 'hey Juliet can we make up' and instead she finds her body, which is also awful. There's a funeral possession. Lady C has another grief solo, shorter and wearier and more quiet. Oh hey, Romeo is here!
Did Romeo ever go to Padua? Unclear. He certainly didn't buy drugs there, because -- after Jeffrey Cirio doe some stellar work at crumpling himself into a little ball of sadness and despair -- Romeo kills himself by pacing down thoughtfully to the bottom of the stage, then turning around and RUNNING HIS HEAD STRAIGHT INTO THE POINTY END OF JULIET'S BIER SJDFLK:DJ:LDFSJ D
Do I think, in this case, poison might have been slightly better? Well, maybe. But one has to respect the commitment.
And now Friar Lawrence is back! maximum agony for Friar Laurence! He wakes Juliet up, and makes a sort of halfhearted attempt to stop her from seeing Romeo's body and then just gives up and goes to stand sadly with his head against the wall. He is so busy leaning sadly against the wall that he does not notice Juliet pull several blood-scarves out of Romeo's dead body, and then calmly strangle herself with them.
On the one hand this looks great and I love the way it makes a visual parallel between Tybalt & Juliet's deaths. On the other hand it is so, so funny that Friar L is just standing there during this whole sequence failing to notice it happening. On the third hand, Ji Young Chae, again, is so good at making me believe in Juliet as a person with her body language alone that even I was looking at Friar L and thinking 'this is very funny' I was also extremely sad. Thank you, Boston Ballet; IMO you nailed it.
So the program was a little ambiguous on this but I am fairly sure the entire story is taking place in Friar Lawrence's guilt mind palace; we begin with Friar Lawrence (dressed like an Anglican vicar) (or like Paul Bettany in Master and Commander, the bit where wears this outfit) and his two Acolytes and they lift him up in a big crucifixion pose and then he writhes around the stage in agony for a bit before allowing Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio to take the stage for some high jinks.
The high jinks are good. They are very good. Mercutio is all big leg capers and mocking bows and shoulder wiggles. Sometimes they all three of them throw their arms around each other and high kick joyously around the stage. They're all dressed in various light shades of gray and white, and flirting with girls in similarly light colors, and then TYBALT AND THE CAPULETS ARRIVE. They are GOTH and they dress in BLACK and have a retinue of GOTH GIRLS with them and everyone does a lot of West Side Story posturing and facing off with each other as they dance-fight. Tybalt and Mercutio clearly have beef and keep getting up specifically in each other's faces in a sort of homoerotic way [we will come back to this later], and also all the corps girls also face off and posture at each other, which is very fun IMO: this feud is not just a men's game, everyone's all in! But it is all posturing, it is high kicks and mockery and shoving each other around but it's not violent, until another set of people arrive in what look more like uniforms --
genarti read this as The Family Retainers and I read this as The Adults -- but either way, for these people, shit is real and they are fighting in a way that is really visually distinct from the way the Teens (Tybalt included) are shoving each other around. At some point Friar Laurence comes into the background to try to calm things down and nobody listens to him and he does some more writhing in agony. One of the Montagues dies, and Benvolio gets pulled into the Montague line to make up the numbers and has to start doing the adult choreography, which IMO is a really interesting touch, but eventually the rest of Verona gets there and everyone scatters.
Then we get Juliet's introduction, which really doubles down on the idea that this version is interested in the idea of a tragedy about youth and young people navigating an adult world. Juliet is first introduced with the Nurse and it is really cute and funny -- the nurse does a lot of little scurrying hopping steps, and then Juliet leaps in and is teasing her, culminating in Juliet straight up flashing the nurse (not the audience, her back is to us) to show that she is Growing Up and Has Boobs Now. Ji Young Chae is dancing Juliet and doing such an incredible job with this, her Juliet is a weird and funny kid. She Is Thirteen Years Old.
Then Lady Capulet enters in full Black Swan mode to make both Juliet and the Nurse nervous because it's time for: The Party! The Nurse has to physically shove Juliet in there to make her go, and then physically yanks her big fluttery overdress off her to make her show off her slinky party dress, and Juliet is so clearly not just shy but body-shy -- people are looking at her! she's not ready for this! the boobs are new! -- before she starts to get into the dancing and have fun with it, and of course as soon as she does start to get exuberant Lady C is taking her aside to show her proper dance steps and Juliet copies her for ten seconds and then starts sproinging again.
By this point Romeo and the Boys have Infiltrated the party, and are sneaking around like the Pink Panther. Romeo and Rosaline (Rosaline is here to make up the numbers) get into a septet with Juliet and Paris and Lady C and Tybalt, and there's several minutes of really effective tension where Juliet and Romeo are placidly dancing with their assigned partners and then just sort of start noticing each other as their paths cross in the dance, a little bit at first, and then more and more until finally the choreography lets them dance together for a moment, and then are locked in while everyone else keeps fighting to pull them away from each other again. Meanwhile, Mercutio and Benvolio are trying to be helpful by dance-flirting with the Nurse, and Tybalt keeps chasing them all around, and apparently at some point in here Mercutio mockingly kisses Tybalt and I MISSED IT because I was watching the Nurse! who is really good and funny and I don't regret it! AND YET. Anyway. Balcony scene, very cute, first intermission. 'This is so good!' I enthuse to Beth. 'I'm having a good time! I hope it keeps being interesting!' Beth hands me her notebook so I can write down most of what I've just described before I forget about it.
SECOND ACT. We are definitely in Friar L's mind palace now because we start with several Capulets dramatically frozen mid-step on the stage while Friar L does some more agonized writhing around them before finally making a gesture that allows them to continue on with the story. Romeo enthusiastically and charmingly conveys his giddy passions to his friends and then get swept up in the whole corps de ballet gathering to sit on benches for .... church? Well, I initially thought it was church -- going to church is a thing that people are always doing in R & J! -- but instead it turns out to be a CREEPY PUNCH AND JUDY PUPPET SHOW because I guess Maillot has also read The Magicians of Caprona. The puppets do various antics, the corps de ballet enthusiastically cheer (Verona loves puppets!) and Romeo and Mercutio get bored and sneak off, which means that of the main cast only Benvolio is left to watch when the two surviving Punch and Judy puppets demonstrate the whole tragic ending of Romeo and Juliet for the cheering Verona crowd, after which they throw off their puppet heads and capes and turn out to once again be agonized Friar Lawrence and his acolytes. (Beth: "Punch and Judy Oracle at Delphi?")
But Benvolio does not know the puppets were trying to warn him, so Romeo and Mercutio come skipping back, and then the Nurse arrives and they all have a good time doing physical ballet comedy before Romeo runs off to get married to Juliet. MEANWHILE, Tybalt and his goth Capulet crew are sashaying around having a good time, Tybalt with a girl on either arm, when they run into Mercutio and Benvolio. Mercutio is UP in Tybalt's face. He rapidly acquires two girls so he can parody the way that Tybalt is dancing with them. He then acquires the black-clad Tybaltesque Punch-and-Judy puppet and frolics salaciously with it. Benvolio attempts to de-escalate, and then Romeo arrives and attempts to make friends, and every time it seems that de-escalation is about to happen either Tybalt looks over at the girls who were hanging on his arm and is visibly like 'my masculinity!!' or Mercutio gets right back in Tybalt's face again.
There are no swords; no one has swords. Mercutio has his puppet, and then picks up some kind of stick (I couldn't see exactly what this was, but definitely not a sword) and Tybalt gets hold of it and takes a swing at Romeo, and Romeo ducks, and Tybalt hits Mercutio, and Mercutio goes down.
And Tybalt is in shock. He's holding out his hands and shaking. It is so clear that he didn't mean to kill Mercutio, or perhaps indeed anyone. Really everyone on stage is in shock, the whole corps is Panicking, there's a little knot of ballerinas down around Mercutio's body and everyone else is fighting with each other, and Tybalt and Romeo kind of go through the motions of the kind of posturing and 'come fight me' that they've done in the past but it is so clear that everything is different now. Romeo pursues Tybalt through the brawling corps -- I actually lost sight of them for several moments, they're in the back sort of pursuing each other behind everyone else -- and then Tybalt is running up a ramp above the rest of the corps and Romeo is running after him with a scarf, and then Romeo tackles Tybalt and STRANGLES HIM WITH A SCARF. Tybalt tries to fend him off with weaker and weaker movements. It takes several minutes. At any point Romeo could decide to stop, and he does not.
Then Friar Lawrence once more comes back to be agonized, only to be immediately out-agonized by Lady C, who throws herself furiously around the stage while Romeo staggers off.
Second intermission! Much shorter. Beth gives me her notebook back. I have time to scribble 'PUPPET ORACLE AT DELPHI?' and 'ROMEO STRAIGHT UP MURDERED HIM???' and then we're back in it.
The third act is Juliet's act. Tour de force. The post-murder Romeo and Juliet pas de deux is of course great but Beth and I agreed afterwards that it was the only time we were very slightly less than one hundred percent riveted, mostly because it was all sort of what we expected to be happening, though we did get a very cute bit of 'Juliet attempting to hide Romeo from the nurse' comedy to prove to us that not all joy died with Mercutio. Here's the nurse! She loves Juliet and she's still funny!
And then Romeo flees and Lady C brings in Paris. Juliet does not want to meet Paris. She does not want Paris to kiss her, which she does. She does not want Paris to look at her, which he does -- and then the nurse, Juliet's funny nurse who loves her, yanks away her overdress again and exposes Juliet in her nightgown for Paris to look at while Juliet wraps her arms around herself with body language that really clearly conveys 'I feel naked and I'm embarrassed and scared'. She hates this! I hate this! but also I love that they did it, and that this production lets Juliet's relationship with her nurse be important and complicated, that it gives huge thematic weight to this betrayal, which is also something that the nurse doesn't really have a choice about because of her position.
Juliet fights with Lady C; then she fights with the nurse. Then Friar Lawrence writhes in and gives her the poison, and we get to see the nurse discovering her, after they've had their fight, and the nurse is doing her funny little quick steps in to be like 'hey Juliet can we make up' and instead she finds her body, which is also awful. There's a funeral possession. Lady C has another grief solo, shorter and wearier and more quiet. Oh hey, Romeo is here!
Did Romeo ever go to Padua? Unclear. He certainly didn't buy drugs there, because -- after Jeffrey Cirio doe some stellar work at crumpling himself into a little ball of sadness and despair -- Romeo kills himself by pacing down thoughtfully to the bottom of the stage, then turning around and RUNNING HIS HEAD STRAIGHT INTO THE POINTY END OF JULIET'S BIER SJDFLK:DJ:LDFSJ D
Do I think, in this case, poison might have been slightly better? Well, maybe. But one has to respect the commitment.
And now Friar Lawrence is back! maximum agony for Friar Laurence! He wakes Juliet up, and makes a sort of halfhearted attempt to stop her from seeing Romeo's body and then just gives up and goes to stand sadly with his head against the wall. He is so busy leaning sadly against the wall that he does not notice Juliet pull several blood-scarves out of Romeo's dead body, and then calmly strangle herself with them.
On the one hand this looks great and I love the way it makes a visual parallel between Tybalt & Juliet's deaths. On the other hand it is so, so funny that Friar L is just standing there during this whole sequence failing to notice it happening. On the third hand, Ji Young Chae, again, is so good at making me believe in Juliet as a person with her body language alone that even I was looking at Friar L and thinking 'this is very funny' I was also extremely sad. Thank you, Boston Ballet; IMO you nailed it.
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Date: 2025-05-31 05:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-01 04:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-31 05:45 am (UTC)I was also slightly less than riveted for Romeo and Juliet's balcony scene pas de deux. >.> They're very very cute! I liked both pas de deux! I just felt that they went on a little longer than they really needed to. But all in all, a truly incredible performance by everyone, all through.
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Date: 2025-06-01 04:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-31 09:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-01 04:32 am (UTC)(Also, I'm traveling for a bunch of June, but let me know if you'd be interested in grabbing coffee/tea while you're here if the stars and schedules align!)
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Date: 2025-06-01 07:13 am (UTC)(Meant to post, by the way, that Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones is in my head enough that I dreamed a new Chrestomanci book, in which a young boy gets hold of an alarming magical thing from the heart of a wood. He begins causing havoc with it, and Chrestomanci turns up and says “I’m too busy for this today so I’m sending you forward a hundred years for my successor to handle,” whereupon the boy starts skipping forward in time like a flung stone. His two encounters along the way are with his sweetheart, now much aged, (I haven’t read The Homeward Bounders in years but clearly I haven’t forgotten it) and with a man who when asked where he comes from says “those islands,” gesturing to a line of low wooded hills.)
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Date: 2025-05-31 12:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-01 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-31 03:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-01 04:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-31 06:04 pm (UTC)The way you describe the Writhing Friar made me laugh. Writhe and writhe in widening gyre ... something something falconer.
Thanks for sharing! Now to go back and read
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Date: 2025-06-01 04:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-31 09:27 pm (UTC)Also very amused by the writhing Friar. Fwrithar. I feel like that's such a mid-late 20th C thing, the "let's give this ballet a frame story about a MAN" ie ABT's Swan Lake, everything Nureyev ever did… But it can work super well, and I feel like Friar L really could use some more guilty writhing, lbr.
The whole thing about the nurse is just 🥺🥺. I really wish I could see this.
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Date: 2025-06-01 04:41 am (UTC)I wish you could see it too! I always get so much out of your thoughts on ballet, I would love to hear what you make of this one if you ever get the chance.
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Date: 2025-06-01 04:56 am (UTC)Maybe one day; I do hope so. I know on the West Coast that PNB does this version!