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Indeed, every time Peter Martins tried his hand at sensuality, his production flat lined. When the ballet focused on violence, however, his choreography showed a heartbeat. In Act I scene one, a 12-person sword fight—sparked between the Capulet and Montague’s will to power—featured Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin. Danced by Amar Ramasar, Tybalt fought the Montague tribe with rat-tat-tat jousting blasts. He put some real muscle into his fighting. Ramasar blocked one oncoming blow by positioning his sword at the blind spot behind his back. The effect, thanks to Rick Washburn and Nigel Poulton, who coached the dancers and who are credited with staging the fights, had bite.

In Act II, Martins’ exploration of violence amplified. When Juliet snubs Paris in front of her parents, her father, danced by Jock Soto, slapped her so hard that it sounded like a clap of thunder. In scene three, Romeo revenged the killing of his best friend Mercutio by blinding and suffocating with his cape, and repeatedly stabbing with his sword Tybalt. This bloodletting made for the most graphic, execution-style killing I’ve seen on a ballet stage. Its effect played more slasher movie than Elizabethan drama just as the relationship between Romeo and Juliet played more Hollywood teen romance than the western world’s greatest love story.

During intermission, I overhead one audience member describe the curtain designed by expressionist painter Per Kirkeby as “offensive.” Kirkeby also created the production’s costumes and sets. He is no stranger to New York City Ballet, having collaborated with Martins on his 1999 Swan Lake. Outfitted in acid-toned red, blues and greens overlaid with pattern-less swirls, the 35-member cast was subjected to Kirkeby’s fauvist experimentation. It was the first time that the dancers didn’t look beautiful. The worst costume was Tybalt’s: a screaming yellow tunic and tights with thick, black meandering lines as though a child let loose on it with a magic marker. In this costume, Ramasar looked like a human banana, partially peeled. Romeo and Juliet were dressed, correspondingly, in blue and light red, the colors used often to distinguish the genders of infants.

In contrast Kirkeby’s set, a single-story, stone façade, which transformed from a ballroom entrance to Juliet’s bedchamber to her tomb, was functionally minimalist. It was also dwarfed by the State Theater’s huge stage. Painted in a naïve style, it clashed with Kirkeby’s ambitiously designed costumes. Nonetheless, Kirkeby’s set helped Martins’ achieve his goal of shortening Romeo and Juliet, which in the hands of Sir Kenneth MacMillan runs toward three hours. The ballet’s comparative brevity also came from Martins’ cutting of Prokofiev’s score and from his deletion of some minor but important characters. Missed were the three village whores who dance with Romeo’s friends Mercutio and Benvolio, showing them to be playboys against Romeo’s deadly serious intentions for Juliet. Without the tarts, the streets dances took on a homogenous quality, upending any potential for describing through dance the town’s social and moral hierarchy, with its good and bad girls.
 

Tyler Peck and Sean Suozzi in Martins' Romeo and Juliet
© Paul Kolnik

The big, athletic jumps Martins made for Benvolio and Mercutio, who were danced by Andrew Veyette and Austin Laurent, showed the artistic director at his choreographic best. In Act II, Veyette performed a rollicking series of jumps that changed facing and legs as though he was walking on air. When he landed from one series, he broke into a soft shoe shuffle like a Broadway dandy. In the ballet’s banquet scene Martins got lazy. His Medieval court dance was a two-steps back, two-steps forward affair. Only Jock Soto and Darci Kistler, playing Juliet’s parents, lent it the needed gravitas.

What about Martins’ choreography for Romeo? With Sean Suozzi, who stands out in dances that have jazzy sharpness and no-nonsense athleticism, Martins had a live-wire dancer. But Suozzi was given generic ballet steps that required seamlessness and understatement—not Suozzi’s strong suits. Suozzi spent much of his stage time supporting Peck in arabesque and then kissing her. Peck wasn’t given much to work with either. She dances with a light sureness, but Juliet is someone who transforms from light-hearted girl to a volcano of dashed hopes. In her dancing, Martins didn’t give Peck choreography to transmit this transformation. Only when Peck grabbed Paris’ dagger and plunged it into her heart, appearing to cough up her guts, did I feel that she had the potential to dance not only pert but powerful.

In the last scene of the ballet, Mark Stanley’s lighting transformed Romeo and Juliet into something memorable. From the four corners of the stage, Stanley directed light shafts, which broadened at the edges and tapered to the stage’s center, the spot where the “star-crossed lovers” lay dead. Too bad Martins didn’t start his ballet with Stanley’s lighting concept. It had the subtle, architectural synthesis of intention that the rest of the ballet lacked.