'Romeo' off the beaten path

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By Jean Battey Lewis

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. | Mark Morris' new, radically different version of Shakespeare's immortal "Romeo and Juliet" has just had its world premiere at Bard College. True to Mr. Morris' reputation as an iconoclast, he has taken an idiosyncratic approach to the most famous love story ever written.

It is an offbeat assignment for him; he brings to it his reputation for originality, musicality and the way he conjures up a casual, naturalistic approach to large heroic themes, making works that feel as current as today's headlines.

Some of these traits are successful in the new work titled "Romeo and Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare," while others are considerably less so.

The fault is not all Mr. Morris'; some of it can be traced to the inspiration for this retelling of the most famous lovers in literature. Sergei Prokofiev, who composed the music during the heyday of Stalin's repressive regime in the 1930s, gave the ballet a happy ending: In his original version, Romeo and Juliet do not die.

It's easy to feel sympathetic to the composer's dismay at this ominous bureaucratic meddling from Stalin's regime, as newly unearthed documents reveal that Prokofiev's happy ending was rejected; many of Prokofiev's sponsors were fired or ended up in the gulag.

However, as reprehensible as their methods were, in this case I think the bad guys were right about not allowing the lovers to linger on: They achieve immortality through their mutual choice to seek death rather than live without each other. Prokofiev's happy ending was evidently influenced by his conversion to Christian Science and its teaching that death is an illusion, but Shakespeare's plot is high drama and needs the ending the playwright gave it.

Other changes Mr. Morris has brought to the work are more subtle. He sets the work on a human, not heroic, scale. The dancers of his company look like regular folk - in the street scenes, they're sturdy, rough and tough. The choreographer has clearly wanted to sweep away cobwebs from a tale encrusted with ballet's glamour, but while doing so, his own movement vocabulary is surprisingly flat and uninspiring.

This from the dance-maker who has given us such trenchant musical interpretations in "L'Allegro, il Moderato ed il Penseroso" and the stunning "Dido and Aeneas" seen at George Mason University's Center for the Arts in winter. (The Mark Morris Dance Group will make a long overdue appearance at the Kennedy Center next season, dancing his "Mozart Dances" in the Masters of Modern Dance series.)

In this new "Romeo," the crowd scenes are full of lowlife Italian street gestures repeated again and again. Mr. Morris has always emphasized equality of the sexes in his choreography, and to prove the point, his Juliet repeatedly lifts Romeo lightly in the air; two women dance two key male roles - Mercutio and Tybalt - and do them effectively.

Mr. Morris says he had more women in the company, so he pressed them into service; they responded gallantly.

Advance notice has pointed out that this is the first time Mr. Morris has choreographed a passionate love duet - in a scene following the lovers' secret marriage by Friar Laurence. The scene gives the illusion that the lovers are naked, but the careful way they arrange their bedclothes is rather more memorable than their supposed nudity. This heterosexual love scene doesn't appear to be an area that inspires Mr. Morris, but the couple I saw were ideal: Maile Okamura was lithe and luminous as Juliet and Noah Vinson was appealingly youthful and naive as a very young Romeo.

Visually, the production is handsome, giving the effect of warm wood paneling by scenic designer Allen Moyer, and it is well lit by James F. Ingalls, while one of its most vibrant features was the conducting of the multifaceted Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, who conducted the American Symphony Orchestra.