The legendary performance has been restored at the Bolshoi Theater: a new version of Romeo and Juliet

Prokofiev’s famous ballet Romeo and Juliet, staged by Sergei Radlov and Leonid Lavrovsky, was once again resumed on the Historical Stage of the Bolshoi Theater. The revival’s choreographer is Mikhail Lavrovsky, the son of one of the creators of this masterpiece. Thus, historical justice has been restored. Because this particular performance is significant for the Bolshoi Theater. After all, it was with him, after the troupe’s 1956 tour in London, that the worldwide fame of the company began, which began to be called the Bolshoi Ballet throughout the world. The success was so deafening that a crowd of English balletomanes, excited by success, drove Juliet – Galina Ulanova – into the car at idle speed, not allowing the engine to start.

The history of the creation of this ballet is replete with tragic twists. Let’s start with the fact that, just like the music of P.I. Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” in its time, the brilliant music of this ballet by Prokofiev was also not accepted unambiguously. “The story of the first listening to the clavier of Romeo and Juliet in the Beethoven Hall of the Bolshoi Theater is no secret. The hall literally emptied from episode to episode. The overwhelming majority of ballet dancers rejected this music in 1936 as not stage-worthy, not danceable, tongue-tied, in a word, unthinkable for the theater,” recalled conductor S. Samosud.

“There is no sadder story in the world than Prokofiev’s music in ballet” – this comic paraphrase of Shakespeare, invented by one of the orchestra members of the Moscow Bolshoi Theater in 1935, was picked up by the entire troupe. Then the “catchphrase” was repeated in theater and theater circles, and the first performer of the role of Juliet, Galina Ulanova, repeated it, right at the banquet on the occasion of the premiere, which was attended by Prokofiev. After her toast, there was loud, infectious laughter. It was Prokofiev himself who laughed. The tension and awkwardness of the situation disappeared.

That is why the world premiere of the ballet with large cuts and in one act (to the music of the first and second orchestral suites) did not take place in the Soviet Union… On December 30, 1938, it took place at the National Theater in Brno. The choreographer was Ivo Vanya Psota, who also danced the role of Romeo in the performance. And this was not the first tragic turn in the fate of the play.

Even before the war, when the ballet “Romeo and Juliet” was first fully staged at the Kirov (now Mariinsky) Theater, the premiere posters of 1940 did not include the name of the brilliant ancient philologist, translator and literary critic Adrian Piotrovsky, who, according to Prokofiev’s memoirs, gave the idea for staging this performance and actively participated in the creation of the libretto: in 1937 he was arrested on charges of espionage and sabotage and shot as an “enemy of the people.”

This performance by director Radlov and choreographer Lavrovsky came to the Bolshoi only after the war; it was transferred from the stage of the Mariinsky (then Kirovsky) in 1946. Moreover, this transfer was also accompanied by tragic circumstances: while the public called the creators of the play to the stage of the Bolshoi, one of them – director Sergei Radlov, accused of treason – was a prisoner of the Stalinist camp near Rybinsk. During the war, evacuated in Pyatigorsk as a result of the retreat of Soviet troops, the theater that Radlov headed ended up in the occupation zone and was transported by the Germans first to Zaporozhye and then to Berlin. Liberated by the Allied troops, the director himself and his wife, poetess Anna Radlova, ended up in Paris after the war, but, succumbing to the persuasion of Stalin’s emissaries, they returned to the USSR to continue their work. Instead of reporters and camera flashes, a “crater” and a sentence awaited them at the plane’s ramp: 10 years in the camps.

The original script for this ballet was also somewhat different. Its creators (Prokofiev, Radlov and Piotrovsky) planned to finish the ballet “safely”, leaving the main characters alive: “in the last act, Romeo arrived a minute earlier, found Juliet alive, and everything ended well. The reasons that pushed us to this barbarity were purely choreographic: living people can dance, dying people cannot dance lying down,” the composer himself wrote about the history of the creation of the ballet. However, this reading of Shakespeare’s play has drawn criticism. Leonid Lavrovsky, who was later involved in the creation of the play (originally it was supposed to be staged by choreographer Rostislav Zakharov), initiated the writing of a new edition of the libretto and obtained the composer’s consent to a number of alterations and the inclusion of additional numbers in the score. The decision of the final has also become traditional.

In preparation for the production, Leonid Lavrovsky studied the works of the masters of the early Italian Renaissance in the Hermitage. He found material on the dances of the era, and for example, the famous “Pillow Dance” was born.

Within the framework of drama ballet (and the Lavrovsky-Radlov performance is one of the most prominent representatives of this genre), the creators of the performance sought to escape from the conventions of the ballet genre; on the basis of Stanislavsky’s system, they experimentally combined the laws of ballet and dramatic theater. The meaning of each image, scene, and gesture was explained to the artists in detail. Particularly important episodes in the ballet were presented as in a movie, in close-up. Radlov created a strong dramatic basis for the ballet, where pantomime became the expressive means – choreography was of subordinate importance.

The strong dramatic basis of the performance and its ingenious directorial decisions so impressed Western choreographers during the Bolshoi tour in London that copies of the Soviet production, smaller in scale in relation to the original source, but more rich in choreography, appear on many European stages – “Romeo and Juliet” by John Cranko ( Stuttgart, 1962), Kenneth MacMillan (London, 1965) and other Western choreographers.

The success of the performance was facilitated by the scenery of Peter Williams – the ballet picture of early Renaissance Italy looked so grandiose in it. The modern viewer is also very impressed by Williams’s decorations and almost all 650 costumes created according to his sketches for the current premiere.

The problem of the new renewal, which followed almost 30 years after the previous one (the last time the Lavrovsky-Radlov performance was resumed in December 1995), is the lack of modern ballet dancers, as well as those who danced this performance in 1995, appropriate dramatic expression. And not even in dancing, but in acting and details of mise-en-scène, unfamiliar to the modern generation of dancers. In addition, there is a film version of the play, beautifully filmed two years before the tour in London, in which the main roles were played by Galina Ulanova, Alexey Ermolaev, Yuri Zhdanov, Sergei Koren. This means you can always compare… And this comparison will be far from being in favor of modern artists.

It is clear that the brilliant performance of Galina Ulanova, who, embodying the image of 14-year-old Juliet on stage at the age of 46, captivated the skeptical balletomanes of London, or Alexei Ermolaev in the role of Tybalt is impossible to beat – such artists are born once in a century. However, in comparison with the artists of the 40s of the last century, all the current nurses, Signors and Lady Capulets, troubadours, jesters, pages and other numerous characters in the play seem inexpressive, while being far superior (and this is important to emphasize) to their predecessors in dance technique. But the problem is that drama ballet requires not technical virtuosity, but acting.

But not everything is so hopeless in the new version of Romeo and Juliet, carefully restored on the Bolshoi stage by Mikhail Lavrovsky and one of the excellent interpreters of the role of Romeo in his father’s play. Some artists of the current generation, paradoxically, even surpass previous examples. So, Vyacheslav Lopatin’s Mercutio was absolutely brilliant (I’m not afraid of this word) in his acting and plastic expressiveness in the first cast, and 20-year-old Daniil Potaptsev was in his very youth (Romeo’s age is not directly indicated in the classic, but, according to researchers, he maybe from 16 to 20) brought life to the performance in the image of Romeo, comparing favorably with the over-aged “uncles” of the pre-war generation. Director Mikhail Lavrovsky, like Franco Zeffirelli once did for his film, for the first cast chose artists as close as possible to the age of Shakespeare’s heroes. And the duet of 24-year-old Elizaveta Kokoreva and 20-year-old Daniil Potaptsev was sensual and passionate in the “bedroom scene” and tragically filled in the dying “scene in the crypt.” Although I liked the dance and acting of Juliet Eleanor Sevenard, who appeared in a different cast, much more. 19-year-old Paris Makar Mikhalkina was also very natural in dramatic acting and a blond wig that suited him very well. It is strange that the image of Tybalt from such an experienced and wonderful artist as Mikhail Lobukhin turned out to be a caricature. The image of Nikita Kapustin in the interpretation of Tybalt’s part was clearly preferable.