Word: romeo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Yalta. To the tune of Prokofiev's rather overexalted music, and the gentle narration of a voice in English, the plot thickens speedily; servants of the feuding Montagues and Capulets 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...
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...
Although the cast of The Ballet of Romeo and Juliet is made up almost entirely of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater dancers, only Ulanova and a few others actually do expressive dancing in the film; the rest is rhythmical miming and pageantry à la Russe. Even the principals are made to underplay the heavily charged scenes. This makes the bedroom scene a little cool, but is a blessing when the bodies start dropping...
Things become even more difficult when the classic Romeo-and-Juliet aspect of feuds crops up in the love affair of Honoré's daughter and Maloret's son. The complications, always hilarious and elaborated with much Ayméan gusto, come thick and fast. But Honoré, the soul of goodness and absolutely free of guile, cannot live down the need for revenge. In the last Rabelaisian scene he stuffs...