Ballets based on Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet” are usually programmed for the month of February, when all things related to love and romance are in the air.
Tulsa Ballet chose to present its version of this tale of “star-crossed lovers,” created for the company by choreographer Edwaard Liang in 2012, this past weekend at the Tulsa PAC.
Removing it from the saccharine sentiments of Valentine’s Day helped emphasize the truly tragic nature of this story of two young people who find themselves overwhelmed by a passion they barely comprehend, and that will ultimately, inevitably consume them.
This is the third time Tulsa Ballet has staged Liang’s work, and it remains one of the most effective contemporary narrative ballets we’ve ever seen. The story is streamlined without sacrificing any of its emotional richness, the physical production is properly sumptuous, the sword-fighting scenes are vigorous and exciting, and the choreography is both physically demanding and richly evocative.
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We saw the opening night performance Friday, with principal dancers Jun Masuda as Romeo and Nao Ota as Juliet. Both dancers are superb technical dancers, capable of completing breathtaking moves with deceptive ease.
They also are equally superb actors, something that is vitally important for a ballet such as this. The tragedy at the heart of “Romeo & Juliet” is, essentially, the hubris of youth — that impetuous willingness to charge headlong down uncertain paths, heedless of the consequences of their actions until it is too late.
Masuda and Ota were absolutely convincing as the teenaged lovers. Their performance in the Balcony scene that closes Act One was full of chaste passion, as the two begin to comprehend the power of the attraction they feel for each other, where a brief kiss, a simple touch of the hand, can contain so much feeling.
Ota’s performance of the Act Three solo, in which Juliet begins to understand the magnitude of what may happen as a result of her romance with Romeo, was a tour de force of dramatic dancing, embodying everything from the bliss of an afterglow to a vision of her ultimate fate, as the ghosts of Tybalt and Mercutio appear to lead her through a haunting pas de trois.
Jonathan Teague Applegate danced Mercutio, Romeo’s high-spirited friend, who provided a good deal of the ballet’s comedy with his exuberantly rakish antics before a fatal sword fight with Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt.
Former principal dancer Arman Zazyan, who danced Mercutio the last time Tulsa ballet presented “Romeo & Juliet,” brought a suave villainy to this role, with a coiled energy that would explode once the swords came out.
This was was Zazyan’s final performance with Tulsa Ballet — he will be joining the Hamburg Ballet in Germany as ballet master later this year.
The company as a whole was in excellent form, as ensemble scenes transformed from joyous celebrations to flashy armed combat (the fight scenes were choreographed by J. Steven Wright).
Resident conductor Enrique Carreon-Robledo led the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra in a powerful, sparkling performance of the Sergei Prokofiev score, full of color and spirit (and, unfortunately, some less-than-pristine passages from the French horns).