by Leigh Witchel
As a ballet, “Romeo and Juliet” has taken on a life well beyond Shakespeare. It’s more often Prokofiev’s story now than the Bard’s. Hong Kong Ballet did a whirlwind weekend at City Center bringing their version of the tale, set in 1960’s Hong Kong.
In a good way, this was a fanboy version of “Romeo and Juliet.” The choreographer, who is also the company’s Artistic Director, Septime Webre, and his dramaturge Yan Pat To knew their source material, and they aced the quiz. Yan’s storyline deftly avoided the mistake of most dramaturges working with ballet: trying to tell a story with details ballet can’t convey.
The production also boasted lively designs. Ricky Chan’s sets featured movie posters of knockoff films (“From Romania With Lust!”) that formed the backdrop of an aggressive, urban setting. Mandy Tam’s fashions were a heightened mix of Asian and Western influences: Mad Men suits, polo shirts with vertical panels, pop art dresses with side slits. Together, the designs reached into Hong Kong’s mythology of itself as a city of neon, billboard advertisements and martial arts.
The weak spot in the production was the sound – an orchestra was likely prohibitively expensive so the company made do with a recording, and it was a badly edited one. Combined with City Center’s sound system, it dragged on an otherwise well-produced show.
There were two casts, each got one show. The casts were mixed Asian and Western; the team dealt with all the implications of class and race largely by being matter of fact about them. Juliet’s family wanted her to marry Mr. Parker, a wealthy Western businessman in a double-breasted jacket and ascot.
The matinee was led by Taras Domitro, a Cuban-born virtuoso who was the It Boy at San Francisco Ballet for a few years, then fell off the radar. It’s good to see him again, dancing well, showing off long legs in extensions and jetés en tournant. His proportions made him seem taller; you only noticed he wasn’t that tall when he stood next to others.
The changes to set the characters in Hong Kong, particularly in supporting roles, were largely cosmetic. Rosaline became Rosa; she gave a lovesick Romeo a blue handkerchief as a memento, which he awkwardly needed to tuck into his pocket in the middle of his solo. Webre took MacMillan’s often double-cast role of Escalus and Friar Laurence a step farther and combined the two men into a sifu, a wise mentor to Romeo played by Garry Corpuz.
The activity of Hong Kong was shown in the street scenes. Leather clad mobsters arrived led by Tai Po, Juliet’s Father’s right-hand man (neither of Juliet’s parents got a name) and the Tybalt figure. Tall, thin Alexander Yap cut a striking figure in a long, black leather coat and made Tai Po unnerving with his cool poker face throughout, even when spat upon.
Webre has been choreographing more than three decades now, and first did a “Romeo and Juliet” for American Repertory Ballet almost 30 years ago. He’s older now, more experienced, more deft and more mainstream, using neat vocabulary that felt more classical than at the outset of his career, but the world has changed as well, and classical has moved closer to what he was already doing. Webre used partnering here with little worries about gender typing. Everyone, male or female, lifted anyone, using torsion or becoming a launch pad for someone else’s jump. Partnering was just another movement.
Webre’s work had and still has a breathless quality. The fight was pandemonium, with nurses and bystanders racing through, details that were both realistic and made things hard to follow. However, the thing that was least clear was the idea of two warring houses: Montagues and Capulets. Romeo was billed in the libretto as the scion of a prestigious family, but there were no other apparent Montagues except his friends, Little Mak (Albert Gordon) and Benny (Lin Chang-yuan Kyle) – Mercutio and Benvolio.
You would expect the fight scenes to be based on Chinese martial arts and top-notch. They were. When conflict broke out, it was expertly and colorfully staged by Hing Chao using various weapons, in the first act, staffs. But it wasn’t clear who was fighting whom.
The production’s Hong Kong-ization of the ballet’s details was rarely less than deft. Juliet’s nurse was transposed to becoming her Amah, a woman often with the combined job of cleaning and looking after children. Gao Ge was young and on pointe, and was introduced with some music used later on by Prokofiev for the nurse that was copied and pasted earlier in the score.
Since we saw her before Juliet, and Xuan Cheng had a similar thin and long-legged build, there was some confusion that was cued better if you were from Hong Kong. My companion at the ballet was born there, and said “At first I thought the Amah was Juliet, but then realized she wasn’t because of the way she was dressed.” Cheng had gorgeous, prehensile feet, the way she could bend and articulate them made her pointe shoes look like gloves.
There are many productions of the Prokofiev ballet to use as models, but this one seemed to be tracking Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 production for the Royal Ballet. With a few alterations, this paralleled that versions’ plot line, and the details kept or changed seemed like riffs or reactions. A reason the transpositions succeeded was that the production realized that the source material wasn’t Shakespeare. It was MacMillan, but even more, Prokofiev.
One clue of the source was one of the quotes that was specific to MacMillan, when the Amah stood behind Juliet and gently pointed to Juliet’s breasts to indicate that she was no longer a child. Even though the quote made clear the sourcing, it seemed to come from nowhere and was one of the few that didn’t resonate.
Webre and his team risked fate by inviting consistent comparison with other versions of the story. There were even echoes of “West Side Story,” as Romeo, Little Mak and Benny circled before their Act 1 trio, jumping in a crouch, antic and gymnastic, tumbling off one another.
The Capulet ball became the banquet of a gala dinner at a floating restaurant. The attendees’ striking costumes were black coats over red outfits: shirts, skirts and pointe shoes. Later on, Juliet’s wedding dress was also red, a transposition to how the Chinese think about color: red is auspicious, white is for funerals.
Instead of slow and weighty, the Knight’s Dance was a spring and swirl of partnering. Yet it still did have a sense of weight to go with Prokofiev’s heavy march. The production’s points of intersection were consistently interesting. There wasn’t a winner or loser in all the comparisons, rather this version bounced off the others engagingly.
One of the biggest points of departure was that everyone knew what was going on, and going wrong, from the get-go. There was no sense of anyone being in the dark. Juliet only looked at Romeo as she danced with Mr. Parker (Jonathan Spigner) and all the guests could see what was happening.
Mr. Parker knew he was about to be cuckolded and argued with Juliet’s Father (Yonen Takano); Juliet’s Father knew his wife was cuckolding him. He tried to keep Tai Po cool and save face, making sure his banquet wasn’t ruined. Everyone could see that Juliet was smitten with Romeo and she didn’t care. It was a marker of her character. No one was a fool, they were making complicated choices.
The production also took what is usually an implied relationship between Lady Capulet and Tybalt and made it explicit. Juliet’s Mother’s and Tai Po’s relationship was used as a contrast and warning: this is what happens when you go into a loveless, arranged marriage.
When Romeo and Juliet first danced during stolen moments at the banquet, Mr. Parker walked in briefly to find her alone, but in a nice detail that showed the texture of the staging, he was only half-paying attention to her; he was still engaged in conversation with guests we couldn’t see. From his gestures we could tell they were just offstage. As he returned to the party Juliet and Romeo resumed dancing.
The “balcony” for the lovers’ duet that closed the act was a harbor pier with scaffolding. Romeo climbed up the poles to reach Juliet. Though the synopsis said she was at home, her home wasn’t visible. The place seemed unattached to anywhere we had seen and seemed only to be there because it’s the Balcony Pas de Deux and there had to be a balcony.
During their love duet, Domitro and Cheng looked ecstatic, but not yet about one another. They hadn’t yet had time to develop chemistry. The pas de deux, as many of the other dances, was busy and breathless, with one lift after another. He pressed her overhead and you could sense her figuring out a safe grip to get down. It would have helped to give them less to do and time to fall in love. Those quiet moments happened later, close to the final kiss. Ironically, the two weren’t truly believable as lovers until Act 3, when he thought she was dead.
Prokofiev takes us back to the street in Act 2, and the local touches Webre and team added were witty and ingenious. The wedding procession didn’t have a priest, but a photographer taking the bride and groom through their obligatory, self-involved location shots with everyone photo-bombing. The mandolin dance was a movie set, with comic characters and bilingual banners: “Doctor’s Office,” “Smile Factory.” In 1994, Webre did a commedia dell’arte inspired divertissement. All these ideas spring from the same roots: a moment of self-referential performance within the ballet.
The letter scene was close to MacMillan’s, with the three friends taunting the Amah, except at the very end, she looked out to us disturbed, as if to say “this can’t end well.” This ballet looked at trouble and tragedy with more fatalism. Just as the banquet guests saw the roots of the tragedy unfold before them, and recognized that something was wrong, the Amah could see the worst, but that didn’t mean she could act to stop it.
Romeo and Juliet met the sifu at a small Chinese temple, where he married them. The brief ceremony (Prokofiev didn’t give much time for it) was a theatricalization of Chinese customs; the bride wore red, the couple bowed three times, and bound their fingers together with a red thread as they danced.
The next scene didn’t go back to the street, but in a smart transposition, to a mahjong parlor where changing positions, arguing and dealing became a dance. Tai Po showed up, brandishing a short, wide and dangerous looking knife in each hand. Little Mak engaged him, using his umbrella as a staff. But Tai Po was looking for Romeo.
The production handled the deadly fights expertly. Tai Po slashed Little Mak under his arm, dealing a fatal blow, but if people killed in the ballet, they reacted. Tai Po was repulsed by what he did; he checked the blade of his knife, staring at the imaginary blood. All Mercutios worthy of whatever name they go by take forever to die; Little Mak kissed Romeo goodbye before cursing both him and Tai Po.
Now that Tai Po finally had the fight with Romeo he wanted, he turned his knife blades inwards, something he did not do with Little Mak. It was almost as if he were pulling his punches. Romeo and Tai Po fought up stairs at the back of the stage, and again, a detail worth noting: Romeo did not have his own weapon. Tai Po extended his knife to strike Romeo, who grabbed Tai Po’s arm and turned the knife on Tai Po, inflicting a fatal blow in self-defense.
Romeo’s reaction to killing Tai Po was even stronger. He threw down the knife in horror after slashing, and tried to allow a dying Tai Po to strike him back. Again, the scene for Juliet’s Mother (Wang Qingxin) was a very public airing of a private matter: She went beyond Lady Capulet’s demonstrative mourning in the MacMillan version to rolling on the ground with Tai Po’s body. Her husband came to her stone-faced, shook her tightly, took her hand and walked her away from the carnage as we moved without intermission into the final act.
It’s obvious from the time saved in a long ballet why productions might choose to delete the intermission, but it’s always odd: we saw Romeo murder Tai Po and a few minutes later he was in bed with Juliet. That scene was one of the more incongruous in the production. Juliet was in bed with her pointe shoes on; Romeo was wearing his pants. That’s not all that different from most productions, but Webre has the couple spend more time on the bed before getting up and dancing, so it was more noticeable.
When the lovers danced, it had echoes of MacMillan’s Act 3 bedroom duet; Cheng pitched herself into en dedans turns in Domitro’s arms; he spun her into lifts. It was a difficult duet, acrobatic as well as balletic with one press after another. One upside-down lift got stalled midair as he figured out the grip.
The scene where her family confronted Juliet was one of the best in the production, and one that came across as powerfully in a wealthy Hong Kong family dealing with an arranged marriage as in Verona. Cheng’s Juliet was headstrong and more than willing to say no to the match, but she was swimming upstream. She refused Mr. Parker to have her father grab her arm. He raised his hand, but did not strike. Even her Amah pushed her to the match, but it was clear that she felt there was no other option. She was terrified and powerless. Juliet was utterly alone in her conviction, and that was the point.
Webre initially avoided the famous MacMillan tableau of Juliet motionless on her bed as she decided what to do. She quickly made a choice to see the sifu, he gave her a potion and she came back; it took very little stage time. Webre then did MacMillan fan service and quoted the pose after Juliet returned. She sat on the edge of her bed as in the MacMillan before taking the draught.
The emotion ramped up and sped to the tragedy. Webre also set a bridesmaid’s dance, a pretty, classical quintet of maidens dancing unknowingly in front of an unconscious Juliet. When Juliet could not be roused, her father cradled her in grief.
In a quick aside happening before the tomb was revealed, Webre showed Romeo getting the horrible, inaccurate news of Juliet’s death from Benny (Lin was a dancer with unusually elegant lines) and rushing to her tomb. If Domitro and Cheng didn’t seem to have chemistry on their first encounter, all reservations were thrown aside by their last. Both went all out. He spasmed carrying her body and screamed inconsolably. Taking her hand, he poisoned herself, and in Prokofiev’s cruel irony, her waking music came immediately after. She discovered Mr. Parker’s body first, then Romeo, but tasted the poison on his lips. Decisive until the end, she stabbed herself and crawled to him to die together.
Star cross’d lovers cross cultural boundaries – the Chinese evidently love them as much as we do. This was a lively, visually striking version, and the savvy conception outweighed any flaws. But the most engaging aspect of the ballet was that it worked both as a local Hong Kong take on a famous western tale, and as a commentary on “Romeo and Juliet” as a ballet.
This didn’t feel like whole cloth, or an adaptation. It was a scintillating transposition.
copyright © 2023 by Leigh Witchel
“Romeo and Juliet” – Hong Kong Ballet
New York City Center, New York, NY
January 14, 2023
Cover: Albert Gordon and Alexander Yap in “Romeo and Juliet.” Photo credit © Christopher Duggan.
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