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Romeo and juliet san francisco opera2/21/2023 Throughout, the dances remain tasteful and intelligently shaped, but without imagination or dramatic fire. This buoyant virtuosity is the closest he comes to making his “Romeo and Juliet” original or even distinctive in movement terms. However, Tomasson’s formal choreography also emphasizes vertical space, deliberately working against the weight of the music through a constant use of leaps, bounds and (in the love duets) high lifts. This is a Verona in which wearing green seems more forbidden than any Montague-Capulet liaison-where all the peasants, nobles, soldiers, clergy and even harlots form one holistic bi-chromatic corps de ballet.Ĭredited to Tomasson and Marty Pistone, the fight scenes incorporate the production’s biggest scenic innovation: an overhead bridge that allows Juliet to watch key moments in the drama (the death of Tybalt, for instance). Unfortunately, the unreality of the physical production not only clashes with the raw emotions in the inescapable, overrated Prokofiev score but minimizes the difference between families at the heart of the story. Underscale in the exterior scenes, oversized in the interiors, Worsaae’s ornate Verona exudes theatrical artifice, just as the lightweight, glittering orange and black apparel that nearly everyone wears enforces a sense of imposed elegance. And, just last week, current artistic director Helgi Tomasson launched an opulent $900,000 production clearly intended to confirm the company’s growing international status.ĭesigned by Jens-Jacob Worsaae, the Tomasson “Romeo and Juliet” is a High Renaissance spectacle as severely stylized as classical ballet itself. In 1976, the Michael Smuin version rescued SFB from imminent financial collapse by offering a popular statement of youthful vitality. In 1938, Willam Christensen choreographed the very first “Romeo” in America for the struggling young Bay Area ensemble. “Romeo and Juliet” ballets are often created as milestones in a company’s history, and no company has courted Shakespeare’s star-cross’d lovers with more momentous results than San Francisco Ballet.
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