If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully

The Verona project, part III

Yes, yes, I did intend to screen everything I'll be blogging this weekend--just not quite so soon; I wanted to view a few more conventional renditions before . . . well, you'll see. But Netflix mistakes were made, and once that happened, I decided to make it a sublime-to-ridiculous weekend.

And good golly, this one is sublime. Look, I know less about ballet even than I do about opera, if that's possible, and I simply chose the top-rated Nf balletic version (there are several) and the top-rated operatic version (there are at least a couple) just so's I could get a little high culcha in the mix--I certainly never expected to like the ballet, and I certainly didn't expect to be transported by it. And frankly, I don't have time for another interest in my life, so it's a little disturbing. But there you are.

Who (how old), when, how long? Wayne Eagling (33 per Wikipedia, and he looks it in close-ups but could be mid-20s from a distance) and Alessandra Ferri (20 but could pass for 13), 1984, 2¼hrs. Royal Ballet, recorded at Covent Garden, music by Sergei Prokofiev.

What sort of R&J? Appropriately passionate. His asking, near the end of the first balcony scene, "Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?" would ring pretty false here, because they take pretty much the full serving of satisfaction. Eagling is perfectly OK, but Ferri is absolutely perfect: in her first scene with the Nurse, she is charmingly barely adolescent, simply playing with her lifelong confidante. Then her parents bring in Paris--a useful plot accelerator, given that there are no words--and she suddenly feigns adulthood, in part to flirt, but mostly, one suspects, to be a good daughter by marketing herself well. To achieve this effect, she dances entirely en pointe--until he and the 'rents leave, whereupon she reverts to her childlike danceplay with Nurse. It is one of many wonderful scenes in the ballet. Another, by contrast, is when J first dances for R, at the ball: this time she dances sometimes on her toes, sometimes in the juvenile-coded balls-of-her-feet mode: if when on commercial display for Paris, she consciously and artificially projects herself as something she's not, for Romeo she displays both the girl she still is and the woman she's becoming. Which is, of course, precisely what we (and he) love about her.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? 7ish, I guess, only because there's a stack of a half-dozen corpses at the end, though truth to tell I didn't notice them accumulating, and the swordplay (Romeo is involved in this version) struck me as thoroughly undangerous until Montague and Capulet weighed in against each other--that was ominous, but the Prince arrived almost immediately after. This scene too is much changed to accommodate the narrative needs of a wordless play: it begins with Romeo wooing Rosaline, who is unimpressed and involved with another, who draws on Romeo, cooling his ardor temporarily at least. Then Romeo, Benvolio, and Mercutio cavort with a trio of strumpets--without question the best addition to the story. It is when Tybalt and his kinsmen arrive in the square and drag the whores away from the good guys that the brawl begins.

"Wherefore": do the film/playmakers know what it means? Not applicable.

Carrion flies? Ditto.

Body count? Five: all but Lady M. (But in truth, the ballet ends when Juliet dies, so there's no mopup scene; who knows whether Lady M has died?)

What (else) is missing? Notwithstanding the loss of all that magnificent language, there is astonishingly little missing from the story that is missed. It's generally not a good idea to edit the Bard, but the cuts here come across as economical, not stinting, and the changes as useful for the narrative and perfectly in keeping with the spirit. One problem is that we see no message sent to Romeo to go awry, which relates to another problem I'll discuss below. We don't see Romeo buy his poison, but when he withdraws the vial from his belt, duh.

What (else) is changed? Well, they dance a lot more. One troublesome change: as I said, much is adapted for the sake of the narrative, and I'd say that the mythical viewer with no knowledge whatsoever of the story would have little trouble knowing precisely what's going on throughout, until . . . "How," I wondered, "does one pantomime 'This is going to make you fall asleep as if dead for 42 hours, whereupon you'll wake and I'll make sure Romeo is there'?" Well, apparently they had no answer: Friar Laurence has the dram waiting for J when she arrives (no need for her to threaten suicide with the dagger to persuade him to provide the potion), and this is one point--a key one, obviously--where if you don't know the story, you're just going to be stumped. Both the previous scene and the following one are played with Paris on hand (again, useful for the narrative), and in the latter she seems caught between resistance and muscular inability to resist, making me think she must already have downed the dram--but no, that's still to come.

Another key change, which mitigates Romeo's blood-guilt: Tybalt's fatal attack on Mercutio is cowardly and unsporting, as he stabs him in the back immediately after M has restored his sword to him rather than pressing his advantage at having disarmed him. Mercutio's death is one of the most magnificent and perfectly textual sequences of the ballet, as he balances jocularity with the grim truth.

What (else) is odd? Perhaps the oddest is the breakneck rush to the finish: the final scene, besides jettisoning the Prince's scolding and the reconciliation of the families, jettisons every character but the 3 who die--and the time between Romeo's appearance and Paris's death at his hands is (I am not kidding--I went back and timed it) 12 seconds. In fact, from R's appearance until J's death is no more than 5 minutes. In that span, though, before Romeo's fatal draught, there is one more fabulous dance, between the star-crossed lovers. Yes, that's right: that requires that she still be as dead, and indeed she is: he tosses and swings her like a rag doll, to heartbreaking effect.

End-of-the-play exposition? Nada.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.