New York City Ballet.

New York City Ballet New York State Theater, NYC April 24-June 24, 2007

This season the New York City Ballet celebrated the centenary of its co-founder Lincoln Kirstein. However, the big news was the company's new Romeo and Juliet, its third full-length ballet by artistic director Peter Martins and a bid to capture audiences too old for The Nutcracker but young enough to empathize with Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers--and to have some disposable income. The two-week run, which coincided with the end of the academic year at the area's many colleges and offered a limited number of $15 seats, may have been a craven exercise in marketing, but it paid off, with packed houses, standing ovations, and legions of 20-somethings at many performances.

Romeo and Juliet counted on Prokofiev's lush, emotionally manipulative score and bargain-basement grandeur to seduce new dancegoers. However, the clunky set by Per Kirkeby and hideous costumes by Kirkeby and Kirsten Lund Nielsen, the dramatic incoherence, generic choreography, stilted acting, and miscast, unconvincing principals only underscored the opportunism of the enterprise. Whole scenes go by without a telling piece of stage business or single resonant gesture. Capulets (in green) and Montagues (in red) mill about the stage, waiting to perform identical enchainements and the swordplay (staged with Rick Washburn and Nigel Poulton) that delivers the men, if not the women, from terminal boredom.

The ballet abounds in strong male characters, and in the hands of dancers such as Daniel Ulbricht, Antonio Carmena, and Adam Hendrickson the roles of Mercutio and Benvolio certainly came alive. Tybalt fared less well, although Craig Hall gave the Capulet bully both authority and weight. (Amar Ramasar looked too nice to be a villain, while Tyler Angle tended to pose like Apollo Belvedere.) The mime roles, although played by senior company members--Albert Evans (Prince of Verona), Darci Kistler (Lady Capulet), and Jock Soto (Lord Capulet)--lacked dramatic conviction and at times bordered on the ludicrous. Equally cartoon-like was The Nurse, whose bawdiness surpassed even Shakespeare's original.

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The conceit behind this production was that Romeo and Juliet should be roughly the age of Shakespeare's lovers. Martins, in fact, choreographed the role on a student at the company's affiliated School of American Ballet. However, because of injury and, perhaps, second thoughts, the leads were played by up-and-coming company dancers and one apprentice, none fully up to the task. Of the four Romeos, only Seth Orza commanded the stage, filling it with an exciting romantic presence. His Juliet, the lyrical Kathryn Morgan, had an emotional directness that was very touching and a musicality that guided her imaginatively to the heart of the tragedy. The technically strong, ever smiling Tiler Peck displayed skill rather than emotion, barely glancing at her Romeo, Sean Suozzi, even in the balcony scene. Erica Pereira, an apprentice who looks far younger than her age, gave an emotionally uninflected reading of the role that barely acknowledged the romantic urgency of her Romeo, Allen Peiffer. With her splendid gifts, Sterling Hyltin, now promoted to principal, simply out-danced Robert Fairchild, a quietly ardent Romeo. Although not a natural actress, Hyltin played the scenes leading up to Juliet's death with intelligence and unexpected passion.

This Romeo and Juliet is a man's ballet, replete with gratuitous violence. Much has been made of Lord Capulet's loud slap when Juliet refuses to marry Paris. But it's not the only slap he delivers in the ballet. After Tybalt's death, he slaps Romeo as well, while in the scene with Paris, he physically threatens the Nurse as he interrogates her. Lady Capulet, who stands by impotently as her husband manhandles her daughter, cuffs the Nurse even before discovering that Juliet is "dead." And in the melee that opens the ballet, there's lots of casual girl slapping. The savagery of Tybalt's death--Romeo not only stabs him repeatedly but smothers him in his cape--like the other instances of violence elicits no response, as though sadism were all in a day's work. Finally, there is something perverse, almost pornographic, in the spectacle of the Capulets, joined by a passive-aggressive Paris, browbeating Juliet in her baby doll nightie.

The other new work this season was Christopher Wheeldon's The Nightingale and the Rose, a not altogether successful adaptation of a tale by Oscar Wilde. In part, this is because the story of a Student (Tyler Angle) enamored of a Professor's Daughter (Sara Mearns), who refuses to dance with him unless he brings her a red rose, interests Wheeldon less than the mysterious Nightingale (Wendy Whelan), who gives her "life-blood" to a withered rose tree to make a single crimson flower bloom. Her sacrifice is for nought: the young woman flings the foul-smelling rose away, and her swain crushes it. For Whelan, now in the twilight of her career, Wheeldon has crafted a role that highlights and extends her gifts. He uses the spidery strangeness of her arms, her stretch, and the feathery lightness of her pointes, to invent a creature of the night--whirring, skittering, more insect than songbird, except in her duet with the Student, when she becomes a woman in love. Her Passion--in the Christian sense of the word---lies at the heart of the ballet, a night of song with a thorn in her heart, as more than a dozen men ("The Red Rose") envelop her in the chrysalis of their surrounding bodies. Bright Sheng's commissioned score, with its Chinese-sounding intervals and night sounds, added to the atmosphere, as did the lunar projections by James Buckhouse.

The season brought excellent revivals of Jerome Robbins' Moves and Dances at a Gathering (where a real current of feeling seemed to flow between Rachel Rutherford and Amar Ramasar). Sara Mearns added the Girl in Green to her repertoire, revealing once again the musicality and interpretative freedom that make her one of NYCB's most interesting young dancers. Megan LeCrone, a corps dancer, gave a "correct" reading of the Agon pas de deux. Although flexible and technically able, she was clearly nervous, only hinting at reserves of feeling and personality. Rachel Piskin and Ana Sophia Scheller brightened the stage in numerous ballets, as did Andrew Veyette, Seth Orza, and Sean Suozzi, while Teresa Reichlen, thanks to her wit and spectacular legs, made the physical gymnastics of Episodes into sophisticated erotic play. In Jewels, Ashley Bouder revealed an unexpectedly lyrical presence in "Emeralds" and Maria Kowroski both classical grandeur and elation in "Diamonds." Megan Fairchild, in "Rubies," lacked sexiness and New York pizzazz.

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Kyra Nichols, who joined NYCB in 1974, gave her last performance this season. She will be sorely missed, above all for the emotional depth and absolute integrity she brought to all her roles (see "Transitions," page 122). In Liebeslieder Walzer this season she luxuriated in every movement, and her phrasing, as ever, caught the breath of the music. Memory seemed to flow from every pore--memory of dancers past, of styles past, of her own earlier self.

She left after a season celebrating Lincoln Kirstein, but also one that celebrated the works he brokered with Balanchine--Concerto Barocco, The Four Temperaments, Agon, Symphony in C, Apollo, and so many other modernist classics. These ballets asserted the greatness of Balanchine of the 1940s and '50s, when, night after night, the curtain rose on a luminous eden of blue light and harmoniously moving bodies. Apollo is the choreographer's oldest extant ballet, but this season, with Nikolaj Hubbe in the title role, it seemed to belong to an eternal present, renewed through the imaginative power of its dancers.