Benjamin Millepied’s stripped-down tale of the star-cross’d Romeo and Juliet for L.A. Dance Project has traveled the world since its creation in 2022, its novel staging reshaped each time to suit the iconic venues in which it has been presented. Now it’s arrived at New York’s historic Park Avenue Armory – a Gothic Revival fortress, home to the historic Seventh Regiment, decorated in Gilded Age splendor and draped in military portraiture and trophies of war.
Four named characters dispatch the plot – Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio and Tybalt. A slim ensemble stand in for townspeople and a dealer who casually hands Juliet a pill at a rave. All other characters presumably considered expendable. I did not miss MacMillan’s happy harlots, but was puzzled by the absence of warring parents, an arrogant fiancé and the regional potentate.
The dancers are forever fleeing the austere stage – a square floating in the middle of the vaulted drill hall, glowing blood-red and rimmed with icy fluorescents – pursued by Steadicam operator Sebastien Marcovici. A former New York City Ballet principal, the fleet-footed Marcovici broadcasts the live camera feed onto a large screen above the stage, with close-ups and cinematic distortions deployed to dramatic effect.
At the Armory this is particularly effective in the grim aftermath of Mercutio’s murder. Enraged, Romeo chases Tybalt through a maze of steel scaffolding beneath the risers of the drill hall where we sit, the camera hanging back and peering through the steel grating of a staircase at the brawl that ends in Tybalt’s stabbing. A scream rings out; we glimpse the flash of a knife and two entangled bodies as the camera flees.
Effective, too, is the claustrophobic club scene that replaces the glittering Capulets’ ball set to the menacing, bombastic Dance of the Knights from Prokofiev’s ballet. Filmed offstage in what looks like a closet, surreally lit by a disco ball, masked participants in streetwear chic strutting and vogueing as if in thrall to an evil DJ. The scene belongs to Tybalt, a chilling Addison Ector. Here Romeo and Juliet meet cute. Their budding intimacy plays out onstage and on screen in a romp through the Armory’s ornate passages. In a stunning piece of stagecraft they appear on a distant ledge in the drill hall, tiny figures in our divided awareness even as the camera captures their kiss close-up and beams it to the screen before us. They run off as if wary of spies and the camera wisely does not follow.
Another searing moment captured on camera is Juliet’s journey through the crypt: down a stately, sepulchral hallway lined with ensemble members who stand with their hands over their faces, marking them as corpses.
The simple yet ingenious visual language extends to vertical fluorescent rods the ensemble carries onstage; their appearance signals that someone has died, or is about to. Never brandished like swords but borne solemnly, they suggest instruments of death but also of mourning and enlightenment. When Romeo and the ensemble thread their way down an aisle, carrying light rods, to Prokofiev’s final number, the same music to which MacMillan sent monks with candlesticks into the Capulets’ crypt, we know where they are headed long before they arrive.
The lovers are played on different nights by two men, two women, or a man and a woman: an enlightened casting blueprint undone by a constricted contemporary-dance vocabulary and a single emotional register. Leads and ensemble alike tap the same narrow assortment of leaps, whirls and slashing limbs to convey joy, anger or despair. Rolling on the floor and swirling lifts signal love-making. Dance phrases deftly match Prokofiev’s rhythms, but largely ignore what his cinematic score so deftly paints – who is oppressing whom and who is making love to whom – bar by bar. In this production, inventive staging and camerawork do the heavy lifting, not the choreography.
The night I attended, David Adrian Freeland Jr. and Morgan Lugo manfully tackled the unsophisticated choreography: Freeland carving incisive lines in space, Lugo finding pathos in Juliet’s discovery of Romeo dead in the crypt.
Such moments when the visceral and cognitive intensity of the play converge are rare because Millepied has set himself the impossible task of telling the story of doomed young lovers without representing the forces that destroy them. Without the “ancient grudge” that ensnares the young and robs them of agency, Romeo & Juliet Suite becomes a tale of random violence rather than a tragedy rooted in societal flaws and a failure of political will. Program notes say Millepied “excised the bloat” of earlier dance versions; he also seems to have excised some vital organs. For Shakespeare’s tragedy is not only about heady young love extinguished but about the older generation whose feud sets the catastrophe in motion and leaves the young to die for it while the rest of us look on.
