Romeo and Juliet
Performed more than 400 times on the world's leading theatre stages, the work has become a signature ballet for the Company. Jean-Christophe Maillot has put everything that makes his repertoire so distinctive into this narrative ballet. Starting from the idea that everyone knows Romeo and Juliet, the Choreographer and Director of the Ballets de Monte-Carlo refuses to paraphrase Shakespeare's literary masterpiece.
Rather than following the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues step by step to its tragic conclusion, he revisits the play from an original perspective: the ballet takes us into the tormented soul of Friar Laurence who, in trying to do good, ends up causing the deaths of the two lovers.
Jean-Christophe Maillot's Romeo and Juliet is the flashback of this distraught man of the cloth, who wonders how it all came to this.
Choreography: Jean-Christophe Maillot, after William Shakespeare | Music: Sergei Prokofiev | Scenography: Ernest Pignon-Ernest | Costumes: Jérôme Kaplan | Lighting design: Dominique Drillot
Premiere: 23 December 1996, Salle Garnier, Monte-Carlo Opera.
