Romeo + Juliet dance production. Music by Prokofiev as orchestrated by Terry Davies. Directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne. Performed 2019 at Sadler’s Wells, London. Stars Paris Fitzpatrick (Romeo), Cordelia Braithwaite (Juliet), Dan Wright (Tybalt), Ben Brown (Mercutio), Jackson Fisch (Balthasar), Harrison Dowzell (Benvolio), Hannah Mason (Frenchie), Daisy May Kemp (Rev. Bernadette Laurence/Mrs. Montague/Nurse), and Matt Petty (Senator Montague/Guard/Orderly) as well as company members Tanisha Addicott, Callum Bowman, Alexander Fadayiro, Cameron Flynn, Emily Galvin, Ashton Hall, Bryony Harrison, Monique Jonas, Hannah Kremer, Sharol Mackenzie, Mark Samaras, Christopher Thomas, Roisin Whelan, and Janacek Wood. Brett Morris conducts the New Adventures Orchestra in chamber mode with 15 or so musicians, many playing multiple instruments. Set and costume design by Lez Brotherston; lighting design by Paule Constable; sound design by Paul Groothius; resident director was Neil Westmoreland; rehearsal director was Paul Smethurst. Young Associates working with artistic team were Arielle Smith (choreography), Elin Steele (set and costume design), Ali Hunter (lighting), Rachel Goldberg (sound design), Alexander Ling (orchestration), and Ellie Slorach (conducting). Directed for TV by Ross MacGibbon. Released 2020. Grade: B+
This latest production from Matthew Bourne bears only a slight resemblance (mostly a few proper names) to the Romeo legend and the Shakespeare play. There are no warring families or proposed or actual marriages and no frustrated Duke, sleeping potion, or civic reconciliation with the raising of statutes of pure gold in honor of dead children. In Bourne’s tale the dramatic tension comes from the suppression of a group of young people who are, for undefined reasons, confined against their will in the Verona Institute boarding school. Here’s the backstory I dreamed up for the Verona Institute: we are now in a society run by politicians and technicians who find it necessary to control the creative and artistic types. This is done as soon as these unruly souls are identified. This should be viewed not as punishment but as "extra training.” The Verona Institute is for the children of the elite—all is unisex, well organised, and antiseptically clean and wholesome. Each morning begins, of course, with role call and vigorous calisthenics for the students:
Everything is supervised by the Psychiatric Medical Orderly (Matt Petty) and the Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner (Daisy May Kemp) with emphasis on proper medications to maintain the desired mental functioning of their charges:
The Verona Institute is privately run and supported by tuition paid by parents. For example, meet below Senator Montague and his wife. H’m, these roles are played by the same Petty and Kemp team we met in the preceding screenshot! The senior New Adventures dancers are terrific actors—when I first watched this it never occurred to me that dancers were doubling up on roles. Here the power political couple seem to be exasperated about something:
The source of their discontent is their son Romeo (Paris Fitzpatrick), an artistic type, now being interviewed below by Governor Escalus (Monique Jones). Escalus can see that Romeo will likely benefit from the Verona Institute experience and she knows that Montague, being a Senator, can handle the tuition. (Monique Jones also doubles as a Verona Institute student throughout the production. If you take away the glasses and the suit, she looks her real age and fits right in with her classmates):
The most benign adult at the Verona campus is the Chaplin, Rev. Bernadette Laurence. Can you guess who is playing this role? Correct: it’s Daisy May Kemp again!
Back to our student body—the students are, of course, enthusiastic about their regular sessions of group therapy:
With all these rich kids living away from home, there has to be 24/365 security to protect them as well as keep them in line. The worst guard is Tybalt (Dan Wright), a hot-headed bully and mental-illness patient himself. He preys on the girls who get the fewest visits from outside. Below he hits on one of the youngest of the girls, Frenchie (Hannah Mason). This kind of thing tells us that the Verona Institute is a much more sinister place than first meets the eye—it’s also a dumping ground for unwanted kids.
I think all the students have names and personalities that would be known to fans who dig deep, but the Blu-ray keepcase has only skimpy and incomplete information about the minor roles.
Juliet (Cordelia Braithwaite) is one of the older girls who never gets visitors. Tybalt has been hitting on Juliet also. Juliet tries to defend Frankie, and she gets raped as her reward. This is probably an extraordinary violent incident even for the Verona Institute, but Tybalt senses that management will not intervene. The rape will have a pernicious effect on Juliet’s mental health:
Every school for young people has to have a ballroom dance from time to time, and the Verona Institute is no exception. Now is the time to talk about the extraordinary emphasis in this production on youth. Bourne productions are “modern dance” with flat shoes for the women (or even barefoot) rather than on point. Since this show is about young lovers, Bourne wanted to stress youth throughout. The major anchor roles are assigned to adult member of the New Adventures company. But Bourne has more really young adult dancers in his company than most. Bourne went even further. He auditioned about a 1000 beginning dancers all over England. He built out 2 touring casts from his regular dancers and then added 6 beginning dancers from each town where his touring casts played. He also allowed select students to shadow all members of his regular artistic team as “Young Associates.” The associates even get credit in the Blu-ray keepcase information. Bourne is, of course, a splendid choreographer. He is also a marketing genius.
The ballroom dance is where this Romeo + Juliet fall in love. It’s time now to talk about the music. Bourne couldn’t call this show something like “R+J” or “Eastside Story” because he wanted to use the Prokofiev ballet score for Romeo and Juliet. This famous piece is recognized by every music and/or dance fan in the known universe as the music for a major ballet performance supported by a full symphony orchestra. Bourne thought this grand piece would be too heavy for his young dancers at the Verona Institute. So he got special permission from the heirs of Prokofiev to rearrange the full orchestral score to one for a musical theater chamber orchestra. He also got permission to move the music around as needed to support his R+J libretto. Traditionalists reacted with horror.
Well, I recently finished reviewing 8 versions of the R&J ballet by 7 major ballet companies to Prokofiev’s full score, that follows, in about 160 minutes, the Shakespeare play as closely as possible in dance. I probably know that music about as well as any non-musician can, and it took days for me to shed all those Prokofiev earworms out of my skull. When I first watched Bourne’s 90-minute show, I was startled to hear how different, although familiar, the chamber orchestra version sounds. After the first run, I immediately played the disc again in Pure Audio mode and closed my eyes.
There are times when the orchestra rests and various movie-like sound effects are incorporated into the sound track. The order of Prokofiev tunes and sound scenes is all different. Some music, like the Dance of the Knights, is repeated at different points. Instrumentation is dramatically different including sounds, like a banjo, that Sergei didn’t even have. In chamber mode, all Prokofiev’s ideas sound clean, vivid, light, and charming in contrast to the heavy, lush full-orchestral sound. It made me remember when as a child my mom played Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf for me on 78 rpm records. I thought of all those Liszt transcriptions of Beethoven symphonies I used to adore on Naxos bargain CDs. Right now, I still feel enchanted by Terry Davies’s magic wand.
Back now the our video and the enchantment of R&J in the ballroom scene below. The music here comes from the point in the ballet score where Juliet and Paris first meet and dance at Juliet’s coming-out party:
Toward the end of the evening, all the staff goes home and guards take a break. Then the students turn down the lights and shift into some dirty dancing that is far, far better than you ever knew to dream of being able to do. In the shot below the kids are just getting started (towards the end the lights are too low for screenshots):
Opera singers and ballet dancers at the big houses are lousy kissers compared to our drama stars in the movies and on TV. They need to buy this disc and see what real kissing live on stage can look like. For example, in the shot below, Fitzpatrick stays lip-locked with Braithwaite as he moves across the stage, balancing on the tiny ledge on the danger side of the balcony fence, by rotating his body to the viewer’s right. Maybe there was a safety net for this close-up:
All the students are elated to have a pair of real lovers in their midst. In the next three shots below we see the high point of the show, a let’s-pretend wedding the students stage for R + J:
But there’s no time for a honeymoon as Tybalt is jealous:
The students revolt and Tybalt dies :
The death of a guard is a serious crises and the Board of Governors goes into damage-control mode. Romeo is restrained and the other students are doped up like zombies:
With Romeo being treated like a prisoner, Juliet somehow gets a knife:
Bernadette Laurence gives Juliet a key to Romeo’s cell:
But events are too much for Juliet to handle and she hallucinates that Tybalt is still alive and has come for her. Romeo, who doesn’t see Tybalt (because he isn’t there), tries to calm Juliet down:
Juliet sounds the alarm and all the students rush to her aid in a scene of total confusion. Look closely and you can see Tybalt and Julia in the back of the mob:
Juliet prepares to fight:
But she winds up stabbing Romeo by accident, and you know what happens next after that:
Everything about this show in terrific except the chain of events leading to the death of Romeo here is too far-fetched to suspend non-belief. Shakespeare’s end for both lovers comes about as the result of an accident—the message to Romeo (that Juliet was only feigning death) got lost in transit. Many an Army has been defeated because a vital message got lost in the fog of war. It appears this weak ending was not too much of a problem when the show was playing live around the UK. The death of Romeo happened too fast for the audience to think about it. But there has to be a better way to end this in an recording. The libretto now leaves me cold and unsettled.
You can see for yourself above that the video resolution and PQ in Ross MacGibbon’s video file is excellent. I think he just bought a complete new set of cameras. But what about video content? My informal sampling of the clips in this show suggests that the pace here is less than 6 seconds per clip, which would indicate a distinct case of DVDitis in a traditional ballet video. Well, I have pretty much given McGibbon a pass on his Matthew Bourne video files where fast action storytelling is the point rather than the abstract artistic beauty of the choreography. SQ is also fine, thanks, I think, to Mike Hatch.
Finally, I wonder: Could this production have an explosive and lasting impact on dance? When Balanchine made his American Nutcracker at the New York City Ballet in 1954, who could have predicted that this would inspire literally thousands of Christmas Nutcracker shows, with mostly amateur children dancers, all across the United States? Could Bourne’s R+J be taken up by high schools, colleges, and local dance companies around the world? I guess this would depend mostly on having the chamber orchestra version of the music available for licence at a reasonable fee. My guess is the Prokofiev heirs would go for this rather than see the music get ripped off by teenagers with their laptops. I wonder if teenagers could waack to Prokofiev? Well, heck, maybe a teenager could come up with a better ending for this.
So on to a grade. Starting at A+, I deduct to C+ for Bourne’s far-fetched weak ending. I’ll move that up to B+ for the exciting music and MacGibbon’s sharp video file.
Here’s a trailer from New Adventures about the production:
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