Romeo and Juliet at 75: The National Ballet Comes Home to Cranko

Oliver Yonick, Chase O'Connell, and Isabella Kinch in Romeo and Juliet. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

Heather Ogden’s Lady Capulet enters her daughter’s bedroom with the dress for Juliet’s first ball hidden behind her back. She holds it there a moment, chin tilted with patrician hauteur, then surrenders it with a tenderness that seems to recall her own girlhood and steps back to let Juliet savour it. A small gesture, it carries the whole ballet: a mother handing her child into a world that will destroy her.

It is a rite of passage, and not only for Juliet. Ogden, a dance actress of the first rank, made her own debut as Juliet in John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet in 2002. Now, in her farewell season with the National Ballet of Canada, she plays the mother, joining a line of Lady Capulets that runs back through Karen Kain to the company’s founder, Celia Franca. When she hands over the dress, she hands over more than a costume: the National is passing its past to its future. No image could better suit this 75th anniversary opening.

The Juliet receiving that dress is Isabella Kinch, a second soloist from Smithers, B.C., making her debut in the role opposite Oliver Yonick, a Toronto-born member of the corps de ballet, both graduates of Canada’s National Ballet School. By entrusting opening night to two newcomers rather than her principals, artistic director Hope Muir has given the ballet new blood, and the transfusion does not stop there. The asterisks marking debuts run down the cast list like a constellation. Every Romeo in the run is among them, as is every Juliet save two recent recruits: Beckanne Sisk, a veteran of Ballet West’s production, and Agnes Su, schooled in the part at Cranko’s own Stuttgart Ballet. It is a gamble, but the work is in good hands, because those teaching it have lived it. Reid Anderson, the National’s former artistic director and once one of Cranko’s dancers, restaged it with Yseult Lendvai, herself a former National Juliet.

The National has lived it, too. Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet is the ballet that, more than any other, made the company. The South African choreographer, who built the Stuttgart Ballet into a world force, created it there in 1962, setting William Shakespeare’s tragedy to music by Sergei Prokofiev. The composer had written his surging score in the mid-1930s for Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, whose dancers declared it undanceable. Leonid Lavrovsky’s 1940 staging for the Kirov proved them wrong and became the template that inspired the young Cranko. In 1964, Franca, the British-born ballerina who had founded the National in 1951, made hers the first troupe in North America to dance it. The $48,500 gamble, the company’s costliest yet, inaugurated its four decades at Toronto’s cavernous O’Keefe Centre and pushed it into the big leagues. The ballet became a talisman. When fire destroyed its original sets and costumes, the company rebuilt the production for its 25th anniversary, and Franca came out of retirement to play Lady Capulet. The National danced it again for its 50th and chose it to close out its years at that theatre, now Meridian Hall, in 2006, the year it moved into the newly built Four Seasons Centre, its home ever since.

Then, for the 60th, Kain, by then artistic director, retired it in favour of a new commission from Alexei Ratmansky. His version is fleet and crowded with steps, but its love duets have never quite left an audience breathless. Cranko’s do. Seen again, his ballet takes its place beside Kenneth MacMillan’s for Britain’s Royal Ballet, which borrows from it almost gesture for gesture, as one of the finest dance versions of the play anywhere: sensual, lucid in its storytelling and, above all, full of heart. Cranko’s is the one that makes you weep.

This time, the tears came before the curtain even rose, summoned by memory and by gratitude for the dancers who, over six decades, made this ballet a company treasure. Mindful of what the National owes them, Muir asked the 200 or so alumni in the house to rise. Kain stood, and so did her great partner Frank Augustyn, along with Vanessa Harwood, Lorna Geddes, Linda Maybarduk, Tomas Schramek, Peter Ottmann, Piotr Stanczyk and many more: the shoulders on which the new generation stands. A rousing “O Canada” followed.

Among those alumni was Veronica Tennant, who first danced Juliet at 18, preserved the role in Norman Campbell’s 1965 CBC television film and chose it for her farewell in 1989. At the first intermission, she was rapturous. “Can you believe how fresh it looks tonight?” she asked, hailing Kinch and Yonick as the very embodiment of what a Romeo and Juliet at the National should be. She raised a glass to “the genius of Prokofiev, the genius of Cranko, the genius of Celia Franca,” and to the young couple at the heart of it all.

Fresh is the word. On Halloween night, the treat was a 64-year-old ballet that looked as if it had been made yesterday, and it kept the house on the edge of its seats through all three acts. The energy is there from the opening scene, as rival Capulets and Montagues jostle through the Verona market and their ancient feud spills into swordplay. It peaks at the Capulet ball, where no one can look away from Kinch and Yonick, because they cannot look away from each other. Cranko gives the lovers a private signature: each arches back over an open fourth, arms raised, eyes meeting over the shoulder, before they pivot and reach for each other, a shape that anticipates the kiss to come. They make it their own.

The balcony pas de deux climbs higher still. It is the beating heart of the evening. Kinch dances with precision but without caution, chiffon streaming as she runs to him, hurling herself forward, then falling backward into Yonick’s arms until her head brushes the floor. Tall and long-lined, he partners with total assurance, his hands secure beneath her ribs, so that she seems weightless. Rapture spills over the footlights.

In the streets, Donald Thom owns Mercutio, all mischief and swagger, even if his double tours don’t always land cleanly. Ben Rudisin makes a magnificent Tybalt: hard, mean and noble at once, a prince carved from marble and seething with wrath. The swordfights, rhythmic and precisely drilled, thrill.

Isabella Kinch and Oliver Yonick. (Photo:Karolina Kuras.)

In the third act, Kinch’s soft glow catches fire. Her hesitation, dread and final resolve as she drinks the potion hold the house. In the crypt, Chase O’Connell’s elegant Paris, guilty only of loving the wrong girl, keeps a stately vigil over the motionless Juliet until Yonick’s tempestuous Romeo bursts in to kill him. Then come the deaths everyone knows are coming. At the final curtain, the audience rose as one, and not only for the young lovers. The cheers rang just as loud for the seasoned artists around them, many of whom once danced the lovers themselves.

Patrick Lavoie, a former first soloist who danced both Romeo and Paris for the company before retiring in 2015, returns as Lord Capulet and inhabits the role so completely that you never catch a dancer acting. Rex Harrington, once Kain’s Romeo, lends the Duke of Verona a gravitas that enlarges a role confined to the opening scene. Stephanie Hutchison dances the Nurse faultlessly, if she is too young-looking for the part. Alternate performances bring two intriguing casting choices: Svetlana Lunkina, the former Bolshoi ballerina and a National principal since 2014, as Lady Capulet, a fitting link to the company for which Prokofiev wrote his score; and Muir herself as the Nurse, making her first appearance on the National’s stage.

Susan Benson’s 1995 designs, refurbished for the anniversary, still divide the old guard, but their ochre brocades, deep velvets and iridescent silks now glow like a Renaissance portrait cleaned of its varnish. Jack Bertinshaw’s Friar Lawrence presides over scenes as still as a Giotto fresco, until the drop curtain lifts on the boisterous market. David Briskin and the National Ballet of Canada Orchestra give Prokofiev’s score its full lustre.

Afterward, the alumni gathered on the grand staircase for a photograph, some with canes, walkers and wheelchairs, bodies that once blazed across the stage now reckoning with age. The sight moved and stung in equal measure. Dance is the most ephemeral of the arts, kept only in memory. On the opening night of its 75th season, the National honoured the dancers who live on in those memories and launched a new generation to be remembered next.

Romeo and Juliet continues at the Four Seasons Centre through Nov. 8.

– Deirdre Kelly is a Toronto-based journalist, author and internationally recognized dance critic and style writer on staff at The Globe and Mailnewspaper from 1985 to 2017. She writes for Dance Magazine in New York, the Dance Gazette in London, and NUVO in Vancouver, and is a contributor to theInternational Dictionary of Ballet and AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds. The best-selling author of Paris Times Eight and Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection, she is a two-time recipient (2020 and 2014) of Canada’s Nathan Cohen Prize for outstanding critical writing. In 2017, she joined York University as Editor of the award-winning The York University Magazine where she is also the publication’s principal writer. In 2023, she published her latest book, Fashioning The Beatles: The Looks That Shook The World.