Oakland Ballet - Paramount Theatre, Oakland, California, October 14-17, 1993, February 3-6, 1994

Dance Magazine, May, 1994 by Janice Ross

Oakland Ballet's 1993-94 season was supposed to focus attention on repertoire, not dancers, but strong dancing from throughout the small troupe's ranks revealed the dancers in fresh relief against the company's ballets. The biggest pleasure of the season, and, one might argue, one of the major achievements of this twenty-eight-year-old company's history, was the October premiere of director Ronn Guidi's Romeo and Juliet.

A chamber-sized work, this, the company's first Romeo, is a ballet where the downscaling of sets, cast, and staging results in a warm and intimate production. The dancing was vivid and nervy, and characterizations crisp, particularly from the company's stalwart principals. Mario Alonzo as Mercutio was a standout, dancing Romeo's sidekick as if he were a street-smart, hot-tempered guy from the 'hood. He danced his death scene as if it were the mad scene from Giselle recast for a man, as he recalled through frail gestures the final fight that killed him. Similarly, Michael Lowe, as Benvolio, headed up the company's thirty-two dancers in a series of sharp individual characterizations. Background details were also consistently sharp, with the crowds framing the central pairs of dancers and reacting with an enthusiastic realism that belied their small numbers.

Guidi has never been a particularly concise storyteller, but with this Romeo he turns that around, producing a dance drama that is a miniature of swift action where the dramatic line flows clear and uncluttered through the two hours of the ballet. Framed by Ron Steger's painted drops depicting a sun-drenched Veronese plaza, the first-act choreography aims for a physical equivalent of language. It succeeds, as danced battles resonate like verbal insults hurled between the rival camps of the Capulets and Montagues.

In the second act Abra Rudisill, as Juliet, extended this movement language with subtlety - literally going limp at the prospect of being forced to marry Omar Shabazz's Paris. Ben Barnhart's Romeo was technically sure but dramatically flat, acting his emotional tumult rather than allowing us to feel it. The bedroom scene in particular revealed a Romeo in love but already mightily preoccupied.

Lara Deans Lowe's Nurse and the redoubtable Howard Sayette's Friar Laurence were both made too meddlesome in the final act. Here the Friar anticipated the crossed signals of Romeo's departure and Juliet's staged death, and the Nurse actually charged into the family crypt and arranged the two lovers in their final postmortem embrace. Throughout, the Oakland East Bay Symphony, under the direction of Jean Louis LeRoux, lent fine support from the pit.

Alonzo stole the show again in the company's other premiere, Frederic Franklin's staging of Leonide Massine's Gaite Parisienne. Using sets and costume designs borrowed from Louisville Ballet and Tulsa Ballet Theatre, and based on Etienne de Beaumont's originals for the 1938 production, the production is a picture postcard of Offenbach's evocation of French highlife. The Oakland dancers settled comfortably into their own version of this frothy portrait of amorous flirtations in a Parisian nightclub.

Cynthia Chin, in the leading role of the Glove Seller, was wisely innocent, inviting business and flirtation simultaneously. Joral Schmalle's Baron was cast as an aristocratically wooden foil to Alonzo's mercurial Peruvian. A delightfully rich character dancer with a nice amount of zaniness, Alonzo now inhabits his roles, dancing fully and acting deeply, and he and Chin carried the show.

Gaite Parisienne's challenges lie not so much in the technique of the choreography as in its evocation of the ambience of a famous Second Empire cafe where le tout Paris went to be seen. American Ballet Theatre's 1988 revival used Lorca Massine's staging and Christian Lacroix's haute-couture costumes to help give it this European flavor, and it was in this aspect of the ballet that Oakland Ballet's production seemed least secure.

Falling somewhere between Bronislava Nijinska's Les Biches and Massine's own La Boutique Fantasque, both ballets Oakland performs, this production of Gaite succeeded as a historical revival but one that still needs a clearer conceptual map of its territory for the Oakland dancers to bring it fully to life.