For all my railing at Peter Martins' stewardship of the New York City Ballet, there are times when I have to admit that he might not be doing an altogether bad job, and that perhaps at times I've been too harsh on his endeavors. I had ample opportunity to ponder this during yesterday's matinee of Martins' Romeo + Juliet. At this production's much hyped premiere last year, I was appalled. Prokofiev's score was condensed and rearranged to support a telling of the story that was both sketchy and bombastic, and the whole enterprise seemed inspired more as an opportunity for marketing the City Ballet brand than an expression of artistic vision. Despite the best efforts of Sterling Hyltin and Robert Fairchild as the lovers, indeed, of every dancer involved, I found the whole enterprise so depressing that I couldn't bring myself to say much about it, other than to concoct some nifty zingers which were probably better left unwritten. So it was with mixed feelings of apprehension and dread that I approached yesterday's performance. And then an odd thing happened: I was entranced; moved almost to tears. I even found myself not only understanding Martins' aesthetic, but, amazingly enough, appreciating it. Romeo + Juliet isn't a masterpiece, but it survives a second viewing in far better shape than I could've imagined.

As he's wont to do with his stagings of "full-length" ballets, Martins reduces the story to its barest elements. There's no Verona, really, just the stage and a large central construction by Per Kirkeby which is constantly shifted about to suggest the story's various locations. There are no townspeople, only the Montague youngsters in green, and the Capulets in red. At the ballet's premiere, I found this reduction robbed the story of its contextual richness. When they're not dancing, they're trying to kill each other. When they're not trying to kill each other, they're dancing. But why are they dancing? Because there's music, and that's what ballet dancers do. The admittedly high-powered, realistic swordfights seemed tacked on, jarring stylistically with the overall danciness. The big duets for the lovers, the balcony and bedroom scenes, struck me as perfunctory and derivative. I understood Martins' reasons for presenting this stripped-down version. City Ballet could never match the cast-of-thousands reenactments of the Renaissance staged by the big national companies, whether putting on McMillan's version, Nureyev's, Lavrovsky's or another's. (Sigh. Delius. Tudor. Nevermind.) Rather than compete in sumptuousness, Martins took the only real choice left him -- to make a virtue of necessity, and make a pared-down version in keeping with City Ballet's somewhat contrarian tradition.

Martins has done this before, somewhat successfully in his Sleeping Beauty, and disastrously with his Swan Lake. (Its first act, taking place in what seems to be a bankrupt kingdom with most of its castle repossessed, is still the stuff of nightmares.) At first viewing, his Romeo + Juliet (yes, they use that ridiculous punctuation) seemed like that first act, writ larger. Per Kirkeby's backdrops looked more riotous scrawls of color than anything representative and the central, ever-shifting set was painted to resemble nothing so much as a crude set of building blocks, which jarred with his admittedly beautiful costumes. In the deliberate crudity of its design, and the sparseness of its characters, the production looked like something a bunch of bright dance students might've whipped up in Pa's barn to save the family farm (with Joaquin de Luz's Tybalt and Daniel Ulbricht's Mercutio, Mickey Rooney was covered, but where was Judy Garland?) The first cast's lovers, Hyltin and Fairchild, did about as well as could be expected with thin material.

What a difference a cast can make! I'd heard good things about the pairing of Kathryn Morgan and Sean Suozzi as the lovers, but I wasn't at all prepared for their sheer dramatic depth and theatrical power. City Ballet dancers can't act? If that canard were ever true, it's not today. I've seen a fair number of wonderful Juliets over the years; Morgan's is as affecting as Kirkland's or Makarova's. I've always believed that older dancers made the best Juliet's, with Fonteyn as the most obvious example. Older Juliets know they must create their character's youth, and having left their own youth behind, can view it with a perspective unavailable to most teenagers. It's not enough for a young Juliet to simply be young; like her older colleagues, she must still show Juliet's youth to the audience, either by also creating that youth by artifice, or by finding within herself the meaning of her youth and showing it to the audience. Why does this matter so much for Juliet and not for Romeo? Much of Juliet's story is about changes within her: from a girl to a woman, from a dutiful daughter to rebellious lover, and, most of all, from wanting life to wanting death. A dancer needs to involve us in the drama of Juliet's internal life, the inner adolescent as well as the outer one. (It's MacMillan's stroke of genius to have Juliet sitting stock-still on her bed while battles rage inside her; of course a great dancer can speak volumes even in apparent stasis.)

This is a long-winded way of saying that Morgan overcame the handicap of her youth to brilliantly portray one. Short and raven-haired, she's still in her teens and looks it. With her large eyes and clear features, she's blessed with a stage face that reads clearly from the back of the orchestra. Strong and assured, she easily handled her role's technical demands with unobtrusive strength and sweet, soft carriage of her arms. Her relaxed technical mastery, even when throwing herself into Suozzi's arms, never outshone her character. Her fixation on Suozzi from their first meeting, growing trust in the balcony duet, and increasing fear and dismay after Romeo's banishment kept me enthralled.

With a lean and hungry look as Italian as his name, Suozzi was a perfect Romeo. His soulful dark eyes hinted at the depths of Romeo's love-lorn pain and love-struck ardor. Even at Romeo's most euphoric moments, Suozzi kept a hint of melancholy about him, as if he knew his story wouldn't end well. I found Suozzi utterly convincing, even in the bare-bones mime Martins gives Romeo. When Suozzi's Romeo taps his chest above his heart to tell Mercutio and Benvolio that he's in love, he moves with a touching gravitas. He's baring his soul to his friends. And when Suozzi kisses his fingertips, it's not a kitschy gesture overdone by generations of parody, but a simple declaration of Juliet's beauty. Often in versions of this ballet, Romeo's efforts to make peace with Tybalt and the Capulets seems an odd weakness, but Suozzi's presented it as evidence of Romeo's growing into an adult, and a sign of strength. The chemistry between Morgan and Suozzi was unmistakeable and electric from their first meeting at the Capulet's ball till their death scenes. In Martins' particularly difficult solos, Suozzi was nothing short of virtuosic, and he partnered Morgan with a thrilling fervor.

Also virtuosic were this cast's three other male leads -- Andrew Veyette's Mercutio, Austin Laurent's Benvolio, and Tyler Angle's quietly menacing Tybalt. Veyette's always had a strong technique occasionally offset by a certain stiffness in his upper back and demeanor. Perhaps wearing a mask agrees with him, as he danced with verve and expressiveness which reminded me of his wonderful Harlequinade of a few years ago. I found his Mercutio utterly believable; even to the shock of his inevitable demise. In his rather thankless role, Laurent also danced with flair; indeed, flashy dances he shares with Veyette outside the Capulet's ball are among the ballet's most exciting.

Angle's Tybalt was also a revelation. No braggadocio here; Angle repurposed his own natural elegance and grace to show a man brimming with quiet menace. In Martins' production, Tybalt is the most dangerous swordsman of all. Angle's Tybalt knows this, and knows all Verona knows it; he doesn't need to threaten. I liked seeing Angle stalk Suozzi at the Capulet's ball; never taking his eyes off of his prey.

As I've implied, there's a lot of high-energy dancing in Martins' production, and the swordfights are equally thrilling. I've never seen such realistic fighting in any production of this ballet. It's worlds removed from the usual you-smack-my-sword-and-I'll-smack-yours. Tybalt's a demon fighter, and it's clear how brave and foolish Mercutio is to take him on. Romeo has only a dagger to fight Tybalt, who wields a dagger and a sword. It's only by trickery that Romeo kills Tybalt -- blinding and incapacitating him with a cape while delivering the killing blows. At the ballet's end, Romeo's killing of Paris is drawn-out and brutal. These realistic, gritty swordfights are stunning, but strangely at odds with the rest of the ballet's stripped-down aesthetic. In the street scenes, Martins repeatedly presents the Capulets and Montagues in formal divertissements. Each family gets one. The Montagues, in their green, hop and weave amongst themselves in pretty garlands (aside from their three leading men, they seem hopelessly dull). The Capulets, in red, are clearly the bad boys and girls, dancing what could almost be a petit allegro from a Martins' class. Everyone might as well dance -- there's nothing much else to do in this empty stage of a Verona, at least until the rapiers come out and it's skewering time. However, there's something jarring about this transition from formal, somewhat abstracted dance to the brutal violence of the swordfights. Not only is the fighting realistic, but so are its consequences -- we see increasing numbers of maimed and wounded men succored by their women. Later, Jock Soto's Lord Capulet sends Morgan sprawling to the floor with an enormous slap.

Although violence, both overt and implied, is central to Martins' conception, I don't think he really considered carefully the dissonances of his odd pairing of extremely un-realistic formal dance which represents, at a level or two of abstraction, what the characters are up to, and the violence, which shows it. It's a little wearisome to keep switching mental gears between the two clashing aesthetics, and it would be more consistent to have the fighting take place in a more balletic idiom, or to have the characters inhabit a more realistic Verona. More consistent, but probably less interesting. I have a sinking feeling that Martins neither noticed or cared about these stylistic clashes. It's only the stellar performances of his dancers, both dancing and fighting, that saved this performance from slipping into the stylistic incoherence which so ruined the ballet for me at its premiere. There are other problems which can't be solved so fortuitously. After the slam-bang first act, the action gets bogged down in the seemingly endless explication of Juliet's quest for help from Friar Laurence, and the endless emoting required of her before she finally takes the poison. Even Morgan seems to run out of fresh ways to look stressed. Also, since there's not much of a Verona, Albert Evans seems less that city's Prince, and more a deus ex machina in white robes and possessed of A Really Big Broadsword. It's a thankless role.

In other words, it's not a great ballet. It doesn't quite pull together its conceits, and it nearly founders under the weight of its clever ideas. Ideas are overrated; it's how they're realized that makes them artistically viable, or not. However, with great performances such as Saturday's, those failings hardly matter, and I'd go see this cast again in a heartbeat.