Philadelphia Ballet presents Juliano Nunes’s Romeo and Juliet

Nunes has set the ballet as a story in a book, with set designer Youssef Hotait’s massive tome at center stage. Dancers play out their parts in front of the watercolor pages that stagehands in costume turn by hand to set the scene. In front of the sketched marketplace, townsfolk shuffle-hop onto the stage wearing the pastels of their storybook, the women in pale blue and pink printed tops and white romantic tutus and the men in pale blue shirts over white tights (Hotait also designed the costumes).

Lightness and lethality

The dancers bend low in tight formation, then the dance opens up with flat feet and deep knees and thrusting hips, mixed with classic steps that set a light tone, a carefree afternoon before tragedy has shown its face. Romeo, in dark blue tights and leather doublet, and his friends Mercutio and Benvolio join the fun.

Isaac Hollis as Mercutio is a standout in a leather jerkin and a sheer white kilt over tights, blending athleticism and mischief as the Montague class clown. But Arian Molina Soca’s Tybalt (in Capulet red) dominates every scene he is in with simmering aggression fueled by lethal pride. One senses in their early confrontations that Mercutio has no idea what he is getting into.

When the pages of the book turn, Thays Golz as Juliet is in pink to match the watercolor roses of the page. She meets Paris (Jack Thomas) in a delicate dance of hesitant curiosity. Even knowing the ending, I was rooting for them.

A fateful party

The ballet pivots on the party, a display of wealth set to Prokofiev’s “Dance of the Knights” with a knell like troops marching in the street. As the guests, the corps enter in deep red velvet tops over white knee-length romantic tutus for the women, white tights for the men. The women in their incongruous tutus are riveting, flaunting their privilege with deep, hunched plies and fists punching toward the floor. A sweeping lunge held in a power pose with their heads at an arrogant angle took my breath away. It felt like mingling with our own power elite at some Washington party.

But this is the story of Romeo and Juliet: at last, they see each other across a crowded room. Zecheng Liang as Romeo is stunning throughout, whether stretching through a huge extension or elevating into the air in a boisterous expression of impetuous youth. Trying to keep him out of trouble, his posse (Hollis as Mercutio and Jorge Garcia Alonso as Benvolio) captures the attention of the crowd with their pyrotechnic, often silly, dance battle.

Later, Juliet greets Romeo from the top of the closed book that serves as a balcony, and descends on an industrial staircase for the centerpiece of the romance. Their dance is joyous, full of low, complex lifts, often sweeping in delirious circles or changing position multiple times, with fish dives and other dramatic trust holds. It brought the audience to spontaneous and uproarious applause. But I felt the emotion most keenly when Romeo returned to Juliet after the duels that have left Mercutio and Tybalt dead in the public square. Their grief is palpable here, as she cradles his head and they curl into each other. In a production with no stage dressing, this is all floorwork, and was heartbreakingly real.

All are punished

The scene at Juliet’s tomb is always wrenching, but even more so because we have watched how a lighthearted Romeo showing off in the public square has been driven into grief-stricken violence. He has not received the message that Juliet is feigning death, and in a kind of madness he murders Paris, who tries to stop him at the tomb. Finally he kills himself beside his love, who awakes to find him dead beside her and uses his knife to end her own life. The ballet always ends before the play has given its moral, but we all know what it is.

Nunes seems to use classic technique when he is going for grand emotion, and Liang and Golz (married in real life) lived up to the choreography. His contemporary movement seemed to use tone to convey the context. By stripping away the trappings of a past time, Nunes makes us look at the story as both a tragic fairy tale and a parable for our own times, about a society of division, driven by the power of the wealthy.

Thanks for reading BSR! If you enjoyed this review, be sure to subscribe to our free newsletter and don’t miss the next one. There’s never a paywall at BSR, and you can join the donors who keep our journalism accessible.