How the National Ballet of Canada’s Romeo and Juliet changed my life forever

When I heard that the National Ballet of Canada was launching its 75th anniversary season with John Cranko’s 1964 staging of Romeo and Juliet — a work long associated with the company — I quickly arranged for a ticket.

The Cranko R&J was the first live ballet I saw, and it forever cracked open the world of live performance for me. Great art can do that.

I was in high school, a decent student with a wide range of interests but only a vague sense of what I wanted to do with my life. I’d probably seen a dozen or so plays, at school or family trips downtown or at Stratford.

Several friends and I took the bus and subway from the suburbs down to the O’Keefe Centre (now the Meridian) to see it. We must have queued for discounted student rush tickets — something I would repeat throughout high school and university.

I remember we were seated in the rear orchestra, house right. I knew Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, of course, since it was one of the plays I’d studied in class, so I was familiar with the outline of the story, the star-cross’d lovers, etc.

But I soon realized that I didn’t need to know anything beforehand. Quickly I understood that Cranko, who unbeknownst to me then had died in 1973 at the tragic age of 45, was a masterful storyteller.

All of that returned last weekend when the curtain went up and Prokofiev’s magnificent score — conducted by David Briskin — washed over me, full of complex colours conjuring the passion of young love, the raucous energy of friendship, the strict formality of social conventions, impending doom.

Cranko, his steps reproduced by Reid Anderson and Yseult Lendvai, finds a movement vocabulary for all of this so each moment is clear and instantly recognizable.

His choreography for the magnificent, booming “Dance of the Knights,” for instance — the music sampled by A Tribe Called Quest and used in everything from the film Caligula and the TV series The Apprentice — establishes the rigid rules of this milieu so effectively, a terrifying metallic lion in Susan Benson’s set looking on from above.

You can chart the relationship between the two young lovers through their pas de deux, beginning with their tentative, shy but magically-drawn-together pairing in the ball scene (barely escaping the eyes of Juliet’s relatives, including Tybalt, a fiery Ben Rudisin), their dizzying dance of ecstasy and discovery in the balcony scene and their tragic parting duet in the post-coital scene when Romeo has been banished.

I didn’t recognize any of the lead dancers on opening night, which perhaps was intentional. The tall, elegant Oliver Yonick (Romeo) was plucked from the corps de ballet, while the winsome, dramatically expressive Isabella Kinch is a second soloist. Both are stars in the making, part of the future of the company.

While they easily exude youthful energy and enthusiasm, making their early scenes together more convincing than their later ones, their interpretations will only deepen with time. There was something a little too safe about their approach to their final duet, particularly in one of my favourite bits of choreography, in which Juliet leaps into the air only to curl up into a ball of despair and avoidance in Romeo’s arms.

Romeo gets lots of athletic leaps and turns, which Yonick executes with grace and accuracy, but Juliet is the character who takes a big emotional journey. By the end, she’s so far removed from that young girl who was so shy about her arranged marriage that she hid behind her protective nurse (Stephanie Hutchison), and Kinch captures this maturity skillfully.

The cast I saw was rounded out by Donald Thom’s extroverted Mercutio, Rex Harrington’s stern Duke of Verona and Heather Ogden, a former Juliet who’s retiring this season, as the imperious Lady Capulet, terrifying in her second act closer, in which she silently wails over the dead body of Tybalt as Prokofiev’s music rises to a harrowing climax.

After seeing that first Romeo and Juliet as a teenager, practically hyperventilating with the emotions and ideas it made me feel, I sought out other performing arts. I stood in line for rush tickets to the opera. I bought student subscriptions to the symphony and a couple of theatres.

“This isn’t a typical ballet,” said one of my friends that night at the O’Keefe, and as I was soon to learn, she was right. I learned the conventions of the story ballets, and soon became eager to explore more contemporary works. (When the National launched its 60th season in 2011 with a new version of the ballet by Alexei Ratmansky, I had to articulate why I didn’t respond so strongly to it.)

Eventually, I started writing about what I thought, seeing what worked and what didn’t, and more importantly why. Other great shows beckoned. But nothing will replace that sense of wonder and discovery I felt so many years ago.

Romeo and Juliet continues at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts (145 Queen West) until Nov. 8. Ticket details at national.ballet.ca