When Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet"" takes center stage at the Overture Center on Tuesday, Jan. 23, most audience members will see the bard's tragedy of star-crossed lovers as they never have before but always wished they had in high school: without words. Instead, audiences will have the chance to see those eloquent verses, complex wordplay and sexual innuendos translated through dance by the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre Company.
Led by its artistic director and choreographer, Yuri Petukhov, the distinguished Russian ballet company is internationally known for its performances in over 50 countries and is currently touring the United States for the first time since 2005. This will be their first performance in Madison.
Petukhov - who has been creating his unique brand of ""athletic and intense choreography"" for nearly 20 years, according to the Overture Center's website - has done some tweaking to the original ballet produced by the famous Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev in 1938, and not just by turning soliloquy's into dance solos and puns into pirouettes. In fact, some pieces will be totally foreign to audiences.
According to Petukhov, one significant difference between the ballet and play is the addition of an entirely new character - Queen Mab (played by Anastasia Filipcheva) - who is actually billed third on the program behind only the lovebirds themselves (played by Akulov Petrov and Anna Borodulina, respectively). Shakespeare aficionados may recall a speech by Mercutio to a dreamy-eyed Romeo in Act 1, Scene 4 that begins ""O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you, she is the fairies' midwife.""
In the ballet, Queen Mab takes on a unique role. First, by representing a fantasy world where the lovers find refuge from their harsh realities, and second, as a metaphor for villainous fate, since it is Mab, not the Friar, who gives Juliet the sleeping potion and ""happy dagger"" that precipitates the play's tragic end.
Mab's origins in folklore are uncertain, but Petukhov seems to have cast her as a crafty fairy, conjuring up images of meddling, mythological gods in stark contrast to the bleak messages about human hatred that Shakespeare's original chided on. Likewise, Mab's control over the lovers gives the story a greater sense of love's hopeless futility matched against the power of manipulative gods. At the same time, her appearence with the then-dead Romeo and Juliet in a ""world of dreams"" during the prologue and epilogue leaves the audience more hopeful than the original.
Another major change made to the original ballet by Petukhov was drastically condensing the performance from three acts to two and from four hours to two. Petukhov said this was done to keep the performance exciting and hold the attention span of today's viewers. Fortunately, only the artistic preludes and interludes have been cut for the most part, preserving the dramatic plot and harnessing the ""best and most emotionally intense pieces"" of Prokofiev's score, according to Petukhov.
The ballet has been receiving rave reviews across the United States.
The performance begins at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday and tickets are still available online at _www.overturecenter.com_, ranging from $15 to $42.
