Romeo & Juliet

Romeo and Juliet fall in love passionately, but their families are embroiled in a bloody feud. They secretly wed, but tragic events force Romeo to battle and kill Tybalt, Juliet's cousin. As a consequence, he is expelled from the city.

When Juliet's parents push her to marry Paris, she resorts to severe measures by taking a potion that makes her appear to be dead so she can flee with Romeo. Grieving, he returns to her gravesite after failing to get word of the plot. Assuming that Juliet is dead, he consumes a vial of poison. Juliet finds Romeo dead upon awakening. Devastated, she stabs herself.

“Remarkable dancers...a Ballet company unlike most others." -The Washington Post

In 1938, the Kirov Theater agreed to stage Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Lavrovsky and Prokofiev struggled for a period over the score and libretto, Lavrovsky eventually persuading the composer to add variations for Romeo and Juliet as well as some other incidental numbers. The ballet premiered on January 11, 1940. It featured sets by Pyotr Vilyams and starred Galina Ulanova in the role of Juliet and Konstantin Sergeyev in the role of Romeo. Lavrovsky's production is widely recognized as one of the greatest examples of the drambalet genre in Soviet Theater. Lavrovsky's choreography for the ballet is highly dramatic and largely realistic, closely hewing to the motions taken by stage actors and mostly eschewing traditional ballet divertissements.

The choreographer made a meticulous study of Veronese archives, medieval novels and descriptions of early dances. For his principal expressive means he chose dramatically vivid pantomime dance. Swearing allegiance to the spirit of Shakespeare, Lavrovsky demanded the removal of all radical elements from the libretto in addition to expanding several parts and augmenting the orchestration. Prokofiev resisted the changes even after the premiere.
The production was designed by Pyotr Williams, one of the finest theatre designers of the age. Williams’ Italy arbitrarily combined heterogeneous elements of the Renaissance: on the squares of Verona there was the cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore and in the costume sketches one could find traces of portraits by Botticelli and Cranach the Elder. Verona literally moved to the expanses of Leningrad: many columnists noted the restrained and not remotely southern flavour of the production.