Review of Peter Schaufuss Dance in Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet at Perth Festival of the Arts 2011

May 24 2011 by Alison Anderson, Perthshire Advertiser Tuesday

PETER Schaufuss Dance launched the classical side of the 40th Perth Festival of the Arts with a theatrically successful and superbly danced performance of Prokofiev’s popular Romeo and Juliet.

Also of interest was that this was the first full-scale ballet in Perth Concert Hall. With black drapes along the front of the platform, this acted as a good proscenium.

The depth and width of the platform (even though slightly reduced to give onstage wings) and the flat stage worked superbly well.

Scenes were set almost instantaneously and evocatively by projected black and white slides (a church tower, rooftops, a colonnade etc) at the back of the stage.

The Dance Company’s soundtrack, with its severe cut-and-paste job reducing Prokofiev’s music from its 150 minutes to about 100, started too quiet then became strident, but the Perth Concert Hall sound crew soon had it giving depth of sound and even a stereo image.

This is the quality they have produced for countless events.

Having a new, good, capacious stage, the company, though gifted and versatile, was still only of a size for Perth Theatre. More dancers would have helped: for instance the female population of Verona for crowd scenes was … one! At a masked ball nearly half the people attending were the three interlopers! Yet the contributions of the entire cast were of a very high standard. They doubled up as other characters: the nurse, at one stage I am sure played by a man as ‘she’ carefully kept her face away from the audience. the prince, even as main a role as Friar Lawrence.

The company was young and energetic, unsparing of themselves in all that they did, but in Megumi Oki as Juliet and Stefan Wise as Romeo they had real stars.

They looked right together. From her first steps on the stage Megumi Oki brought an increased vibrancy and definition.

She looked of the age and slight build Shakespeare asks for and this made for amazingly effective lifts by Stefan Wise, himself a most expressive dancer.

Expressive, too, was the word for Juliet’s mimed scene with Friar Lawrence.

It was an evening of superb theatre, wonderfully danced by a perhaps too small company, but it was appreciated in volume and at length by the enthusiastic audience, giving a special roar for the appearance of Peter Schaufuss at the final curtain calls.

Ian Stuart-Hunter