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National Ballet of Canada - Ratmansky's Romeo and Juliet, London, April 2013


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Amelia: Many thanks - I have not seen that clip before but it's exactly what I had in mind, and it's still so close to the ballroom choreography that something of the kind must have been in Ratmansky's mind as he worked that scene.

 

Simon:  Pheromones???  A nice thought, but .......

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I'm glad I made it to the last London performance on Sunday. I enjoyed many elements of the Ratmansky version despite being very attached to MacMillan's. Guillaume Cote and Heather Ogden had me emotionally involved by the end - I shed a few tears! For me though, the stand out performances were Jiri Jelinek's menacing and powerfully danced and acted Tybalt, and Piotr Stanczyk's fabulous Mercutio. The choreography really allowed those characters to come alive and I shed rather more tears at those 2 dying......!

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Yes, I should have mentioned Jiri Jelinek's powerful performance as Tybalt as well.

 

I hope that NBoC won't have left with the impression that the production was universally unappreciated by the critics and audiences alike. In addition to the critics which I mentioned above, I note that Alistair Macaulay was enthusiastic as was the Balletbag reviewer who saw it in Canada. I have also read a great many positive comments on Twitter. For those of us (very many ballet-goers) who have seen MacMillan's version (perhaps many times) Ratmansky's R&J seems a less full-blooded affair. One bit which I really liked was in the first act when the crowd parted to reveal two dead men lying on the ground. It was very effective and a chilling foretaste of the tragedy to come. I liked the greater role for the friar too.

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Janet, that's an incredible number of different productions of R&J that you've seen!

 

It's not really that many when you consider that just about every company has a production of R& J and some actually have two or three.

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Indeed, I've seen 3 productions at both ENB (Ashton, Deane (RAH and proscenium - in fact I remember Tamara Rojo as Juliet when we saw it in Manchester), Nureyev) and Scottish (Cranko (again we saw Tamara Rojo once), North and Pastor).

 

I would have to say my 3 favourite productions are Ashton (ENB), Morricone for NB, and Pastor for SB.  Myleast favourite are the Bolshoi (late 1980s), Geneva Ballet and RDB (Neumeier).

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