Word: juliets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...meet and taunt one another into a brawl that fills the square. Soon the entire cast is introduced: Romeo, handsome and brawny; Friend Mercutio, here a playboy with wonderfully impudent toes; Tybalt, an arrogant, bloodthirsty Capulet; the stony senior Capulets and Montagues; and, last and best, Ulanova's Juliet, not quite girlish and a bit plumper about the waist than the American fashion in dancers...
Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet has been a favorite of Russian audiences ever since it was premiered at Leningrad's Kirov Theater in 1940. It has plenty of pageantry, a familiar, heart-wrenching plot sufficiently removed from the realities of the Socialist state to be acceptable on all levels, and a fat part for Russia's legendary Prima Ballerina Galina Ulanova, now 46. The Russians, well aware that...
West yearns for a good look at Ulanova, have trimmed and tailored Prokofiev's work into a 96-minute color film. The Ballet of Romeo and Juliet. This week the film, the first feature-length movie of an entire ballet, which took a 1955 Cannes Film Festival grand prize, begins its first limited showings in the U.S., will be shown nationally next fall. It has its shortcomings as cinema, and it has a storybook languor that seems old-fashioned in contrast to the fast pace of U.S. ballet, but it makes excitingly good on its promise of a look...
...When Juliet is on camera, the ballet goes lyrical, and there is no need for the narrator. By the swiftness of her flashing toes, as she and Romeo first face each other, she establishes a mood of girlish ecstasy; by the neat way she lifts one calf across the other while Romeo holds her aloft, she expresses womanly satisfaction in her conquest; at the marriage, the very line of her pouter-pigeon torso, stretching straight back to her pointed toes as she is held up, delivers an emotional wallop. But the high point of Ballerina Ulanova's performance...
...from rising star to reigning diva. Yet to the hundreds of well-wishers who tramped through her dressing room it was puzzlingly apparent that this diva was perhaps the most improbable mutation of the type since Charlotte Cushman hauled on tights and ranted Romeo to her sister's Juliet...