Alastair Macaulay, NY Times

March 28, 2014

Rome and Juliet meet at a dance; Oberon and Titania reconcile with a dance; we’re told how enchantingly Cleopatra once hopped 40 paces down the street; in the scene of “As You Like It,” Duke Senior addresses the four young couples: “Bride and bridegrooms, dance you happiness away.” In Shakespeare’s plays, dance and movement often recur. (There are even touching moments when characters exclude themselves from danceing. Jaques in “As You Like It” declines to join in: “I am for other than dancing measures.” In “Romeo and Juliet,” Lord Capulet says to a cousin: “You and I are past our dancing days.”)

It’s no wonder choreographers are often employed to assist with stage productions. In Tyrone Guthrie’s celebrated 1937 Old Vic staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”- using Mendelssohn’s incidental music- the dances, by Ninette de Valois (founding director of the company that became the Royal Ballet), were led by Vivian Leigh’s Titania and Robert Helpmann’s Oberon. In John Caird’s 1989 production of “As You Like It” for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the cast (which included Sophie Thompson and Alan Cumming) performed dances by Matthew Bourne. (The audience was encouraged in enter the auditorium 10 minutes before the starting time, to watch.)

Because some Shakespeare plays deal with young love, magic, and the elemental, they take readily for dance; treatments of “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” proliferate every year. In June, New York City Ballet revives George Balanchine’s two-act “Midsummer Night’s Dream” ; dance offers no more luxurious or fascinating compare-and-contrast exercise than the juxtaposition of this and Frederick Ashton’s one act “The Dream.” (They both use Mendelssohn’s music.) American Ballet Theater sometimes programs a Shakespeare package; in June and July, at the Metropolitan Opera House, “The Dream” returns on a double bill with Alexei Ratmansky’s “The Tempest.” […continued]

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