The greatest love story of all, ROMEO AND JULIET, kicks-off the new Palace Opera & Ballet Cinema Season from Friday 30 October. Celebrating its 50th anniversary, Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s masterpiece, made famous by Prima Ballerina Assoluta Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev who took 43 curtain calls at the premiere, will be presented for the cinema by Darcey Bussell.
In this performance, captured live in HD from the Covent Garden stage in late September, the love-struck Romeo is danced by brilliant Australian Principal Steven McRae and his beautiful Juliet by American Principal Sarah Lamb, who Australian cinema audiences will recognise after her star turn as Alice in the January 2015 screenings of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Rich in the swaggering colour and period costume of Verona street life, the ballet has magnificent designs by Nicholas Georgiadis and a gripping score by Sergey Prokofiev, famed for the spine-tingling ‘Dance of the Knights’. With sword fighting, romance and heartbreak, the drama takes the audience from the sumptuous ballroom of the Capulets, to the sensational balcony pas de deux and the stark tomb of the final doomed meeting of the lovers.
Back on stage 50 years after the first curtain up, the production is set to resonate on the silver screen given MacMillan’s own love of film. Lady Deborah MacMillan (the late Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s widow) says: “Kenneth was a complete movie-nut; he loved film and it’s this passion that makes his productions work so well on the big screen. When choreographing he would pre-empt where audiences would look next, capturing the imagination with every movement, and it’s this innate sense of what would work on camera that so often drove his vision for the stage. He also believed in creating real characters with real stories and in a ballet such as Romeo and Juliet the heartbreak and passion will be all the more evident up close and personal in cinemas.”
ROMEO AND JULIET is the first production to come from London’s Royal Opera House in the 2016 Palace Opera & Ballet Cinema Season, which also features opera and ballet performances from Opéra National de Paris and for the first time this year, Milan’s famous La Scala.
ROMEO AND JULIET will screen in Palace cinemas from Friday 30 October to Wednesday 4 November. For more details visit http://www.palaceoperaandballet.com.au.
SYDNEY ARTS GUIDE HAS FIVE IN SEASON DOUBLE PASSES TO GIVE AWAY TO THIS SCREENING. BE THE FIRST TO EMAIL THE EDITOR- editor.sydneyartsguide@gmail.com with R and J give away in the subject heading. WINNERS WILL BE ADVISED BY RETURN EMAIL.