in which i recommend a little-known property
No homo but I wept into my mask at the ballet last night. Nothing to see here but I was listening to “Lovefool” on the bus this morning. Not something anyone needs to worry about but at my desk today I’ve watched a video of Baz Luhrmann talking about the difficulties of filming teenagers in a swimming pool when they’re always getting called away by the legally mandated tutors. Nope, really, you can overlook that after lights out and as our bedtime audiobook hummed I was warbling “eeevenn deaaaath won’t paaaaarrrt uuss nnnoowww” in sotto voce to Megan who was either already asleep or, well-accustomed to my tendency to keep talking until the exact merciful second my consciousness flickers out, letting the sound float above her head unobserved. Nobody get themselves riled up but Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet [playing at the Ahmanson in Los Angeles through February 25] fucking slaps, slaps, adrenaline straight to the breaking heart slaps.
Being a thrilled simpleton where both ballet and Shakespeare are concerned– I am intuitively interested in both but have given neither serious study/The bulimic Susan May Pratt character in Center Stage and obviously Hamlet’s Ophelia with her erotic melancholia each spoke to me as a depressed and eating disordered teenager–I was most excited for the chance to engage with the two at once and live before me. “At the Ballet” from A Chorus Line is a text on girlhood I respect immensely though I have not yet proven myself born to dance. Megan Abbott following up the hot house flower ballet romance and bloody holiday fandango of The Turnout with a book about how one must never go to the woods with their husband (scout’s honor, I will not!!) was a letdown. The incredible strength which is required for a ballerina to appear so impossibly breakable entrances me deeply. Yet even with hopes high, and entirely apart from what I expected, this Romeo and Juliet is more striking than I know how to explain. You’ve really got to see it. I feel silly, hand-waving as if for some poor underseen title, but the lively interpretation merits such enthusiasm, and further I do think we are basically all in desperate need of a couple hours in the dark with no phones watching something gorgeous and crazy happen. There is no time like the present to get a little freaky and no better show in town to do it with. This Romeo and Juliet is the blinding white heat of first love as far as the eye can see and every dancer is almost too beautiful to be believed. I’m a slut for toe-shoes and did not get them. Not needed! The dancing here is like nothing summoned in the mind’s eye by the word “ballet”, so much as it is a physical explosion of feeling, seismic, flowing, at times more fitful than elegant, and better for it. Red, writhing, clever, and obvious, thank god, very sexy then loudly and powerfully gone. They’re barrel-rolling up and down the stage without breaking their kiss!!!!!! Finally, someone has figured out what ART should be!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Matthew Bourne is British and apparently famous for his gender swapped Swan Lake, not that I’d know, being a slob, though now I am intrigued. His Romeo and Juliet takes place “in the near future” at something like a private prison for troubled teens called the Verona Institute. The exact nature of the place need not be explained because immediately you get the point: Pity thee who come alive to their wanting here. On a stage of white subway tiles and flashing lights we watch acrobatic young people–unbearably alive–leap, twirl, and dive to dodge rapist guards and pill-pushing nurses. This particular reinvention of the text manages somehow to be very definitely just the sort of thing I would have joked about writing when I was fifteen watching Girl, Interrupted too much and also a complete stroke of genius. This club genuinely does have everything. Blood soaked white costumes. Slutty disco orgying at the supervised asylum school dance. Stolen pleasure. Straightjackets. Boys stealing each other’s pants for fun. A senator bribing an administrator not to expel his son. A lady reverend. Gay kissing. A gang of children strangling a cop. It seems, perhaps, that ballet-goers, in LA on a rainy Thursday, at least, are not quite sure when to clap during a performance. The audience was engaged, but at several moments you could feel the tension in the room of hundreds holding their hands just barely off the lap, waiting for some signal of the appointed time. I, too, was monitoring my responses carefully, for fear that I might stand up and wolf whistle or possibly scream.
When I think of Romeo and Juliet, what first comes to mind, honestly, is the murderous gay White House chief of staff Cyrus Beene telling Kerry Washington, in Shonda Rhimes’ horny lunatic masterpiece Scandal, so stupid & good I sometimes can’t believe it really aired on ABC, that she needs to get her head out of her pussy and stop thinking of herself and Fitz–the Republican president she is having an affair with……. Yes, let it not Ever be forgotten that Scandal is a show about a beautiful, talented Black woman rigging an election so that her married, white, Republican boyfriend with no eyebrows [he’s soo hot don’t @ me] can be president! Also he is a president with policies broadly to the left of any real American president from any party lmao—as Romeo and Juliet because Romeo and Juliet were kids and, crucially, died. That memorable burn and the three West Side Story songs I regularly turn to when feeling sad (“America” “I Feel Pretty” “Gee, Officer Krupke”) were before yesterday the main significance The Bard’s teen tragedy had in my life. Romeo + Juliet (1996) of course a film of great stylistic consequence (how me and every third dyke think we look come spring) but I’m thirty-two. Thirty-two and younger today for a night spent before that spinning, sporting witchcraft which so keenly approximated sex and dying. It is no secret, as I can’t be kept from telling people, probably as some tic which requires me to announce my embarrassments like I push on bruises, that I had to drop out of my adult ballet class last year out of shame for the time I was forced to fake sick and whimper away in the middle of practice due to inexplicably taking a half weed gummy I’d found in my bag on the way to the studio, which proceeded to hit a lot harder than I saw coming and allowed for my body to slip the leash of my mind beyond the point of danceablility. Now I wonder if it is not my only recourse to go back again at least to keep alive, if at a great distance, the dream of flying.
In closing I will note:
1. I realized quickly that I was actually familiar with the Sergei Prokofiev music which Bourne rearranges a bit in this show, though I said otherwise on our drive to the theater. American figure skater Sasha Cohen had a program set to selections from it in the early 2000s, during which fertile, fawn-limbed period I had decided to be a rabid Sasha Cohen fan so as to create a playful rivalry with my skating obsessed middle school best friend who greatly favored Michelle Kwan, much in the way that I’d make a joking point to put often into contrast my flat chest with her freshly rounded frame. Surely that was all normal and would reveal nothing upon analysis. C’est la vie!
2. I really feel there is an Oscar nomination (at least!) in it for whichever actress would star in my Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald biographical film about just the year or so she spent zealously trying to become a ballerina at an ancient twenty-eight.
consider: Generously earning the goodwill of a gifted magi who might then be persuaded to come and hit me over the head with a stick or something so as to remind me how to read again. ** Praying for my NBA fantasy team, please. So many of these boys have got a hangnail or a conscientious objection to posting up and I’m really in the weeds. ** Joining my movement to make work illegal when it rains. ** Hip openers tonight, queen? ** Okay the thing is I accidentally won (read: was artificially inflating the price of for sport and got what I deserved (i.e. a gift! because I’m an angel.)) a May December For Your Consideration package that someone was selling on Ebay so look forward to seeing me displaying willful poor taste in my baby pink “INSECURE PEOPLE ARE VERY DANGEROUS” ballcap I guess. **