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DANCE REVIEW
YOU needn't be a feminist to note that it was Juliet holding sway Monday and Wednesday nights when American Ballet Theatre returned to the repertory Kenneth MacMillan's turgid but spectacular 1965 version of Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet."
This production was strongly influenced by the earlier Soviet ballet by Leonid Lavrovsky with Galina Ulanova as Juliet - a staging that also places more emotional emphasis on Juliet than on Romeo.
Then again, if you had, as the Russians did 50 years ago, Ulanova to dance Juliet - or in MacMillan's case a decade later, Margot Fonteyn - what would you do?
And, now, here was ABT with two exceptional Juliets to flash into the ballet's spotlight: Diana Vishneva on Monday, and Paloma Herrera on Wednesday.
Vishneva has also appeared with St. Petersburg's Kirov Ballet in the 1940 Lavrovsky original, but here, partnered with Angel Corella, she danced the MacMillan version with singular depth and conviction.
Her Juliet, tripping lightly into trembling adolescence only to stumble instantly into womanhood and tragedy, has enormous power and a truly touching dramatic sensibility.
Corella - ardent, passion-swept and dancing like the wind - made a perfect Romeo, exulting in that inevitable doomstruck drama that lies at the heart of the play. The memory will be stained by Vishneva's death scene - poignantly real, yet translated into a poetry of sustained image.
The later pairing of Herrera and David Hallberg wove their own tragic poetry. Herrera moves into tragedy with such simple grace that the power of her fall, the inevitable consequence of that sudden welling passion, takes the audience by surprise.
And not only the audience - for young Hallberg, making his debut as Romeo and dancing with immaculately restrained classic style, appeared also to be swept off his feet by Herrera's unrestrained, tempestuous love.
Once more, Juliet ruled.
ROMEO AND JULIETAmerican Ballet Theatre at Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center at 65th Street; (212) 362-6000. Season runs through tomorrow.
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