‘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.

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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.

‘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.

Radiohead in Concert at Roseland - Review

“That’s show business,” Mr. Yorke concluded in mock approval. “Until then, it’s going to be like this.”

The crowd seemed fine with those conditions — thrilled, actually. This was an intimate show by Radiohead standards, and one of only two on the band’s visible horizon. (The other, at Roseland again, was scheduled for Thursday night.) And when Mr. Yorke stepped to the microphone for the next song, maracas in one hand, all delays were quickly forgotten. Against a brackish hum of synthesizers, he sang in a mode of conspiratorial surrender:

I will shape myself into your pocket

Invisible

Do what you want

Do what you want

The song was “Lotus Flower,” a standout from Radiohead’s self-released eighth album, “The King of Limbs,” which dropped out of the ether early this year. And what sounded on record like a coiled contraption was made to feel darker and choppier, at least until the chorus, when Mr. Yorke sidled into his terse but radiant falsetto, his voice glowing over the room like a chandelier.

If smallness was a subtext of Wednesday’s show, it made sense: smallness is one way to understand “The King of Limbs,” which clocks in at under 38 minutes and still manages not to cohere as a whole. It’s an album seemingly intended for atomization, for absorption by the digital metabolism. (Do what you want.) It’s also a meaningful departure from the immersive, unambiguous album-ness of “In Rainbows,” which the band served up in 2007, with a twist. (Pay what you wish.)

The show opened as “The King of Limbs” does, with “Bloom,” a reverie propelled by something like refracted samba rhythm. Philip Selway, Radiohead’s regular drummer, worked busily but stoically, and so did a second drummer, Clive Deamer, hammering at a bank of electronic pads.

Lending a third pair of hands on percussion was the band’s lead guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, momentarily hunched over a snare drum and floor tom. The bassist Colin Greenwood, his brother, served as a movable anchor, shifting the emphasis bar by bar.

Pulse is another way to understand “The King of Limbs,” and, by extension, this unfolding phase of Radiohead. In reductive terms, the band has shifted away again from solid riffs and toward diffuse texture, as it did in 2000, on “Kid A” (Capitol).

But in the same way that the songs from “Kid A” evolved into rousing live-show fodder — in this show Mr. Yorke began “Everything in Its Right Place” with an interpolation of “The One I Love,” by R.E.M., hardly an oblique gesture — much of the new material landed with accumulated weight. And at nearly every opportunity Mr. Yorke was in motion, his gangly but limber dance moves pointing to the savvy behind his self-consciousness.

Some highlights were predictable: in reverse chronological order, “15 Step,” “Myxomatosis,” “Subterranean Homesick Alien.” But there was also “Staircase,” a new-album castoff that the band recently played on “Saturday Night Live.” It moved in an involuted swirl, all loopy cymbals and pecking guitars.

“The Daily Mail,” another song that didn’t make the album’s final cut, began as a wry piano ballad — “The lunatics have taken over the asylum,” Mr. Yorke cooed — and slowly ballooned to epic proportions. Radiohead had performed the song this week on “The Colbert Report,” but not with this much vehemence.

After it was over, Mr. Yorke naturally put in a plug for the financial-crisis documentary “Inside Job.” Of the investment bankers pilloried in the film, he added: “They’re still here. Still working a few blocks from here.”

But uneasy introspection has always suited Radiohead better than moral certitude. To that end, “All I Need,” a self-effacing love letter from “In Rainbows,” was desperate and magnificent; “Codex,” an entreaty with undertones of suicide, conveyed a chilling beauty. And “Give Up the Ghost,” which began the first encore, had Mr. Yorke on acoustic guitar, sampling his voice to produce a shimmering curtain of vocals. “Don’t haunt me,” went one falsetto refrain, spectral in itself.

What followed that was “The National Anthem,” from “Kid A,” gnarled and driving. And then, from the new album, came “Morning Mr. Magpie,” a whorl of guitar arpeggios and double-exposed drumming. Mr. Yorke sang its lyrics, about confronting a proverbial thief, with steel in his tone. “Now you’ve stolen all the magic,” he sang at one point, “Took my melody.”

Whatever that meant, the band piled it on, layer upon layer, sounding huge and unperturbed.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 29, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly named the song that ended the show. It was not "Morning Mr. Magpie," which ended the first encore, but not the show's second encore.