Romeo And Juliet

The sexy, passionate Romeo and Juliet that opened last weekend at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival is just what R&J should be: a mix of potent chemistry between the two teens that rips through a starry-eyed first half and a star-crossed second. It's directed with a command of both the characters and the language by Rick Sordelet, who also happens to be the busiest fight choreographer on Broadway; this season, he's directed the brawling in the revival of Fences and the new musical The Addams Family . Sordelet also provides a historic link to this production: He did the fight scenes for Romeo and Juliet at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, on the campus of DeSales University near Quakertown, in 1992 - its inaugural season.

Everyone loves to mess with Romeo and Juliet. Rare is the production that sees Montague tilting at Capulet in Verona's dusty streets, and Vagabond Acting Troupe's version of the play is no exception to this Shakespeare-shuffling trend. Set midsummer in some post-apocalyptic principality, the show opens with Benvolio (Marc Cairns), clad as a Vietnam-era hippie vet, performing Tai Chi amidst the grunge of Aileen McCulloch's graffitied and chain-linked set. Director Marcia Hepps has a firm grip on the play's thematic tug-of-war, and her able cast heaves right along with her, at least through the first act. The problem is that, although Hepps is skilled at handling the story's comic elements and even its tenser moments, when the body count starts to pile up, she is far less adept.

It was borderline sweltering Tuesday night, and Alina Cojocaru - the star many people had bought tickets to see - was injured weeks ago and couldn't dance. But the Royal Ballet nevertheless presented a gorgeous, richly detailed Romeo and Juliet at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts. Leanne Benjamin, the tiny, dark-haired principal dancer who had taken Cojocaru's place, was an absolutely adorable Juliet - perky and impulsive, with the mercurial emotions of a teenager. Johan Kobborg was a dashing blond Romeo who literally swept Juliet off her feet, lifting her as she bourr?ed toward him when they met at her family's ball.

Romeo and Juliet, as a ballet, offers a precise challenge to the director and the dancers: They must bring immediacy and emotional nuance to a very familiar story. For the Pennsylvania Ballet, which is performing John Cranko's 1962 choreography to Sergei Prokofiev's 1940 score, the challenge is to draw on the company's neoclassical base and sensitivity to music as a means of giving the audience what they really desire - more romance. The Ballet's Romeo and Juliet, at the Academy of Music through June 16th, runs nearly three hours and has good scenery, but is disappointing.

We begin our love match in fair Sao Paolo, with two households, both alike in fervor. Willowy Juliet is from a family that worships Palmeiras, the Brazilian soccer squad clad in green. Square-jawed Romeo is a second-generation booster of Corinthians, the men in black. When Juliet meets Romeo, they are magnetically attracted. But will the ancient grudge between these teams - think Philadelphia Eagles versus Dallas Cowboys - repulse them when each learns of the other's allegiance?

If Shakespeare hadn't imagined a Romeo and a Juliet, a choreographer surely would have. The young couple's headlong rush into doomed love speaks not only to the energy of dance, but to its poignant ephemerality as well. As do all the great librettos of romantic ballet, Shakespeare's play describes a love too passionate for earthly life. It ends at a portal to the afterlife, a tombstone. The natural affinity between the play and dance is borne out with remarkable amplitude in a survey the American Ballet Theater once made of choreographed Romeo and Juliets: The company found that no fewer than 95 choreographers had tackled the play between 1926 and 1986.

H. Michael Walls is among the Philadelphia area's finest actors, so it should be no surprise that his directorial debut at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival is, first and foremost, an actors' production. The Romeo and Juliet he has mounted on the festival stage at DeSales University is marked by sharply etched, intensely human performances in four of the play's principal roles - and any Romeo and Juliet so happily favored is more than halfway home. To start with, of course, there are the Romeo and Juliet of Robert J. Hamilton, making his second festival appearance (he was Ferdinand in The Tempest two years ago)

No one, obviously, told the Bristol Riverside Theatre that this is strictly against the rules. A Shakespeare play in its proper period, with no agenda except to make sense of the text? What could these people be thinking? The play is Romeo and Juliet, and just consider the possibilities. Romeo and Juliet as victims of child abuse. Juliet's nurse as the addle-pated avatar of a failed health-care system. The city of Verona as the global economy, with a set depicting the World Bank and characters dressed in the specie of various nations.

"Romeo is in our blood," said a Romania-born friend of Marin Boieru, who was also born there, during an intermission of Romeo and Juliet Wednesday night at the Academy of Music. Wherever Boieru's passion came from, he turned the Pennsylvania Ballet's premiere of John Cranko's three-act ballet into a triumph. It's rare that one dancer can galvanize a production as big, multifaceted, and sometimes cumbersome as this Romeo and Juliet, but Boieru did it. From the first, he was a man in love.

From the outside looking in, there are so many reasons for Curtis Opera Theater not to mount Bellini's bel canto version of the Romeo and Juliet story, I Capuleti e I Montecchi , you couldn't help walking into the Thursday opening with utmost skepticism. Casting this piece is tough enough for world-class opera companies: It requires high-wire Olympic-gold-medal singing as well as a cultivated, highly specific style. Theatrically speaking, these operas can seem hopelessly static and antiquated.

In J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, the boy was dressed in leaves, as perhaps was Pan, the Greek god of nature whom Barrie had in mind. When Pennsylvania Ballet gave the ballet Peter Pan its Philadelphia premiere Thursday night at the Academy of Music with Alexander Peters as the boy from Neverland, his sprightly body was not clad in leaves, but scantily enough in shorts and straps around his chest to suggest a ruffian from the wilds. The Oregon Ballet originally commissioned choreographer Trey McIntyre to create this Peter Pan, his first full-length ballet, but funding problems caused him to set the work on the Houston Ballet in 2002.

Romeo and Juliet, if timeless, is not actually a tale as old as time. You can trace it back pretty far, though, to a 1476 Italian story and through several evolutions until Shakespeare grabbed it for his stage play around 1595. That version sticks today - arguably the most popular and well-known love story in the world. As tragic characters and star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet themselves continued to evolve, with their greatest contemporary impact as West Side Story's Tony and Maria.

People in Center City are thrusting blades and filling the air with clanks and zings. They spring into the air as others slash with swords where they were standing just a moment earlier. Some spar while racing about, or hurl stray weapons and send them spinning into other fighters' hands. Some come at others with daggers. Several die, it appears. Then they get up. It's a coincidence, but this month of March features more swordplay on Center City professional stages than usual - three substantial productions that cannot be effectively staged without old-fashioned dueling violence.

Lantern Theater Company's Romeo and Juliet begins before it begins: fights on the street, stealthy comings and goings, women are grabbed, rich, highborn men are drunk and belligerent. Everyone is armed to the teeth - swords and knives - and then somebody says "peace. " Yeah, right. What a place Verona is: Feuds, duels, and havoc will, as they say, ensue. The young star-crossed lovers will, through their suicides, teach their parents the need for reconciliation. This old, sad story is about two teenagers from warring families who have a moment of joy only to have things go terribly wrong through an agony of mistiming, mistakes, parental commands, and just plain bad luck.

PRINCETON - Recovering lost, minor works by major composers can seem a bit pathetic: If the music wasn't worth hanging on to in the first place, how great can the rewards be? Yet the work being done on Sergei Prokofiev by Princeton University scholar Simon Morrison suggests, increasingly, that this is one composer who rewards most any hunt. Prokofiev's 1936 collaboration with writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky in a stage adaptation of Pushkin's novel Eugene Onegin was stillborn, partly because the writer was falling out of favor with the Soviet government.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's Tchaikovsky Spectacular at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts is a good summer event for all concerned: A full house is guaranteed and the program, while popular, still shows off what the orchestra does best. The concert was led Wednesday by young, elegant, in-demand guest conductor Vasily Petrenko, whose Russian nationality gives him an authority in this repertoire that was apparent even amid the 1812 Overture 's cannon fire (more on that later).

Though the story of Romeo and Juliet never goes out of fashion, the question posed by the Opera Company of Philadelphia is this: Can it be about fashion? And on a less-than-Armani budget? Skepticism abounds in advance of Friday's opening of Gounod's Romeo et Juliette, which turns the Montagues and Capulets from families into rival fashion houses, spraying paint over each other's posters while vying for market domination. Surely the opera company's executives, Robert B. Driver and David Devan, are fielding plenty of "star-crossed runways" wisecracks.

Marshall Flaum, 85, an award-winning producer, director, and writer who specialized in documentaries, died Oct. 1 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of complications after hip surgery, his family said. Mr. Flaum won five Emmy Awards, had several more nominations, and was twice nominated for an Academy Award, for the documentaries The Yanks Are Coming (1963) and Let My People Go: The Story of Israel (1965). Mr. Flaum wrote, directed, and produced both documentaries.

IMAGINE if Romeo and Juliet had texted their love to each other. Or Abigail Adams had IMed her devotion to our second president. Or Elizabeth Barrett Browning had sent to hubby John: "How do I love thee? Let me tweet the ways. . . " That thought is beyond depressing, especially since there's little hope that future generations will experience the abundant joy of putting pen to paper and creating epistolary masterpieces, an art that's on life support, if not already moribund.