A.B.T.'s New Romeo and Juliet

DANCE

ARTS FAIR

Caravaggio at the Met. Lloyd Webber in church. Warhol the tastemaker. Schlesinger the filmmaker. Art is all. All is fair.

"You see, it's not about the costumes, or even about dance," says Kenneth MacMillan, the British choreographer. "It's about youth and energy and sex, about love and passion. After that, everything else follows." And what wonderful things do follow in MacMillan's production of Romeo and Juliet, newly mounted for the American Ballet Theatre. Long and eagerly awaited, it is the most extravagant piece of dance drama to be presented on the American stage in years.

Written half a century ago, Sergei Prokofiev's brilliant score for Romeo was first danced in Stalin's Russia. A generation later, in 1956, the ballet's greatness became apparent in the West when the Bolshoi brought it to London. It wasn't until 1965, however, that the Royal Ballet produced the first British version—MacMillan's original, which is today the measure for all others.

Although MacMillan created his ballet for Christopher Gable and Lynn Seymour, one of the supreme danceractresses of all time, the leads were given over for the premiere to Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, who made it a personal triumph. While Nureyev defied space, Fonteyn defied time: a middle-aged woman, she transformed herself into an impetuous teenager. Over the years, Romeo and Juliet has attracted the legendary names in dance—Antoinette Sibley and Natalia Makarova were two of MacMillan's Juliets; Anthony Dowell and Mikhail Baryshnikov, two of his Romeos—but no matter where the work was performed, it was always understood that it was the Royal's ballet, that it was Britain's.

Now, for the first time, MacMillan's super show has come to America, with its own homegrown Romeo and Juliet, Robert La Fosse and Leslie Browne. Considering the A.B.T.'s heavyweight roster, Texas-born La Fosse, the company's youngest male principal, and Browne, a soloist who is best remembered for her roll at the barre with Baryshnikov in The Turning Point, may seem brave choices for such important roles. But MacMillan sees them as naturals for the honors: "They're young, they're physical, they're passionate, and they're hot. They're what Romeo and Juliet is all about." Ef it has taken twenty years for MacMillan's magnificent production, complete with Nicholas Georgiadis's opulent sets, to cross the Atlantic, it's been well worth the wait.