‘Radio and Juliet’ at Skirball Center - Review

Here’s the pitch: a ballet of Romeo and Juliet. Sure, that’s been done before, but this is contemporary, set to songs by Radiohead, sure to appeal to a youthful demographic. And get this: Juliet doesn’t kill herself. The whole love story comes through her flashbacks. This thing is stripped-down, chic, just Juliet in a corset and six men in suits without shirts. It doesn’t take up your whole evening, either. An hour and you’re out.

Radio and Juliet From left, Matjaz Marin and Tijuana Krizman of Ballet Maribor in Edward Clug's staging at the Skirball Center on Friday.

Breaking news about the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia and more.

A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.

Judging by the young crowd that filled the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University on Friday night, the choreographer Edward Clug has found a formula for selling tickets. The “Radio and Juliet” he created for the Slovenian company Ballet Maribor has been touring since 2005. It’s a hit, but more of a programming success than an artistic one.

Mr. Clug’s choreography is detailed and sharply defined. Its most distinguishing feature, however, is twitchiness. Bodily extremities flick and jerk so frequently that it seems the entire cast has a nervous disorder. Perhaps that’s by design, to illustrate modern anxiety, but it becomes silly.

In a dance to Radiohead, the twitches can be partly justified as punctuation, acknowledgment of the beat. Mr. Clug also takes a robot voice from the band’s album “OK Computer” as the excuse for a mechanical solo for Juliet, adroit but gratuitous.

Occasionally the lyrics speak to the situation (Mercutio dies to the track “Bulletproof ... I Wish I Was”), but mostly the music is there for atmosphere. It works best in the fight scenes, where the speed of Mr. Clug’s style locks into a song’s sense of contained agitation finally erupting.

As Mercutio, Christian Guerematchi steals the show. Small and dark, he’s the most fluent dancer on the stage, now slinky, now explosive. His dying twitch is sad because it means he will dance no more.

Tijuana Krizman’s Juliet isn’t Shakespeare’s great soul but a girl with some spunk. During a love duet with Romeo (the lanky, accurate Matjaz Marin), she bats at his jacket, one of several moments between them that ring true. Rather than tragic romance, Mr. Clug emphasizes the awkwardness of adolescent attraction.

Despite the framing and the gender imbalance, Mr. Clug’s reduction retains the basic outline of Shakespeare’s play. His deviations are invariably diminishments. This Romeo is passive, a mere bystander to his friend Mercutio’s death. Repeatedly, he is replaced at Juliet’s side by the other men, an odd motif that has the effect of making Juliet look like a tart. Instead of poison, there is a forbidden fruit, a ridiculous lemon. And the only upshot of Juliet’s survival is video of her moping in a bathtub, fully clothed.

A flashback of Romeo’s death is the ballet’s final scene. He just lies there while Juliet writhes through one more solo. The ending took me by surprise: That’s it? It’s over? Only in retrospect could I admire the economy with which the production, skipping forward in blackouts, raced through its material. But I should have guessed how it would end. The last thing Juliet does is twitch.