Playwright: Based on the play by William Shakespeare, choreography by John Cranko and music by Sergei Prokofiev
At: The Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University, 50 E. Congress Parkway
Contact: ( 312 ) 902-1500, www.ticketmaster.com; www.joffrey.com; $15 - $125
Runs through: Feb. 26
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
Shakespeare without words: It is as luminous and breathtaking as a thousand heart-piercing emotions in the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago's telling of Romeo and Juliet.
It's long been true that everything is beautiful at the ballet, but in this production, beauty transcends the visual and becomes viscerally explosive, sublime and, ultimately, steeped in sorrow fathoms deep.
Accompanied by the Chicago Sinfonietta's masterful interpretation ( Leslie B. Dunner conducts ) of Sergei Prokofiev's evocative score, the company moves in John Cranko's choreography with all the passion, brutality and romance that Shakespeare's tragedy deserves.
With Jurgen Rose's lushly detailed scenery and costumes, moments become indelible: Romeo and Juliet, peaceful as sleeping doves in an ethereally blue bed chamber; a golden wall of Capulets moving as one in a glittering, fearsome barricade while Romeo and Juliet lock eyes at a masked ball; a spectral burial procession of black-cloaked mourners, marching in the light of candelabras; a rollicking marketplace of such bawdy, celebratory sensuality you half expect Falstaff to come rolling in.
Romeo and Juliet begins with Romeo sighing and pining not for Juliet but for someone named Rosaline. In Willy Shives's ( principal dancers alternate performances ) depiction of the besotted mooncalf, the audience knows immediately that Romeo is in the throes of puppy love, a prelude to the undeniable emotion that will consume him body and soul when he first spies Juliet. When that happens, it's as if all the energy of the most vivacious adolescent has been abruptly channeled into a single surge of the heart with the intensity of a thousand suns or an ocean of distilled tears.
There's a similar evolution in Maia Wilkins's Juliet. She begins carefree as a daffodil, a butterfly in a butter-colored cloud of a dress, flitting through a garden that seems on the verge of bursting into bloom. Contrast this with the later Juliet, virtually bleeding anguish as she begs her parents not to force her into an arranged marriage.
Profound love and desperation have transformed the giddy girl into a woman subsumed by desire and a steely willingness to lie, scheme and sacrifice anything in order to be with Romeo.
And that brings us to an utterly scalp-prickling moment between Friar Laurence and Juliet. It's a moment that elicited gasps opening night, as Wilkins truly seemed to defy gravity, not in a flight of fancy, but with a slow, somber, prayerfulness that foreshadows Juliet's fate.
Against all this is the Sinfonietta's performance of Prokofiev's magnificent score, from the dissonant, disarming outbursts that punctuate the story's tragedy to the melodic riches that color the scenes of passion and play.