Music: Ballet on Film

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Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet has been a favorite of Russian audiences ever since it was premiered at Leningrad's Kirov Theater in 1940. It has plenty of pageantry, a familiar, heart-wrenching plot sufficiently removed from the realities of the Socialist state to be acceptable on all levels, and a fat part for Russia's legendary Prima Ballerina Galina Ulanova, now 46. The Russians, well aware that the

West yearns for a good look at Ulanova, have trimmed and tailored Prokofiev's work into a 96-minute color film. The Ballet of Romeo and Juliet. This week the film, the first feature-length movie of an entire ballet, which took a 1955 Cannes Film Festival grand prize, begins its first limited showings in the U.S., will be shown nationally next fall. It has its shortcomings as cinema, and it has a storybook languor that seems old-fashioned in contrast to the fast pace of U.S. ballet, but it makes excitingly good on its promise of a look at the great Ulanova in action.

The action takes place among massive stone arches, against a brooding Verona-like background—actually the hills of the Crimea, near Yalta. To the tune of Prokofiev's rather overexalted music, and the gentle narration of a voice in English, the plot thickens speedily; servants of the feuding Montagues and Capulets meet and taunt one another into a brawl that fills the square. Soon the entire cast is introduced: Romeo, handsome and brawny; Friend Mercutio, here a playboy with wonderfully impudent toes; Tybalt, an arrogant, bloodthirsty Capulet; the stony senior Capulets and Montagues; and, last and best, Ulanova's Juliet, not quite girlish and a bit plumper about the waist than the American fashion in dancers.

When Juliet is on camera, the ballet goes lyrical, and there is no need for the narrator. By the swiftness of her flashing toes, as she and Romeo first face each other, she establishes a mood of girlish ecstasy; by the neat way she lifts one calf across the other while Romeo holds her aloft, she expresses womanly satisfaction in her conquest; at the marriage, the very line of her pouter-pigeon torso, stretching straight back to her pointed toes as she is held up, delivers an emotional wallop. But the high point of Ballerina Ulanova's performance is her fluttering despair when faced with a second suitor, and then her precipitous dash, head thrown back, down Verona's streets.

Although the cast of The Ballet of Romeo and Juliet is made up almost entirely of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater dancers, only Ulanova and a few others actually do expressive dancing in the film; the rest is rhythmical miming and pageantry à la Russe. Even the principals are made to underplay the heavily charged scenes. This makes the bedroom scene a little cool, but is a blessing when the bodies start dropping at the end.