Romeo and Juliet

A score the officials nearly buried

Sergei Prokofiev began writing Romeo and Juliet in September 1935, and the trouble started almost at once. His first version ended happily, with the lovers alive, which provoked enough objection among Soviet cultural officials to stall production entirely. The score sat unstaged for three years while the composer reworked it.

The first performance happened outside the Soviet Union: 30 December 1938 at the Mahen Theatre in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in a compressed single-act version choreographed by Ivo Váňa-Psota. The Soviet premiere followed on 11 January 1940 at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad, with choreography by Leonid Lavrovsky and the tragic ending restored. That production won international notice and a Stalin Prize, and it fixed the shape most companies still use — 52 numbered movements spread across four acts and nine scenes, with the Dance of the Knights as the music everybody recognises whether or not they have seen the ballet.

What Prokofiev left behind is unusually hospitable to choreographers. The score carries its own dramaturgy: street brawls, a ball, a balcony, a duel, a tomb. A company does not have to invent structure, only a point of view.

The versions that became the repertory

Frederick Ashton made the first major Western staging for the Royal Danish Ballet in 1955. John Cranko followed at Stuttgart Ballet in 1962 with the version that has arguably travelled furthest, built on crowd work, brawling and a corps that behaves like a town rather than a chorus line.

Kenneth MacMillan's Royal Ballet production opened at Covent Garden on 9 February 1965, made in roughly five months, with sets and costumes by Nicholas Georgiadis. The leads were meant to be Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable; box-office considerations put Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev on first night instead. The audience called them back 43 times and the safety curtain had to be brought down to clear the house. A film directed by Paul Czinner appeared in 1966, and the choreography has since been restaged by American Ballet Theatre and Birmingham Royal Ballet among others.

Nureyev made his own version for London Festival Ballet, now English National Ballet, in 1977. Krzysztof Pastor's for Scottish Ballet came in 2008. Alexei Ratmansky's, with sets and costumes by Richard Hudson, was created for the National Ballet of Canada in 2011. None of these replaced the others; the result is a title that exists in parallel editions, and a ticket for Romeo and Juliet can mean very different evenings depending on whose name sits under Prokofiev's.

2026 belonged to Cranko

The Australian Ballet gave the Cranko staging its big revival this year, staged by Yseult Lendvai and Mark Kay with Jürgen Rose's restored designs. It opened at the Joan Sutherland Theatre at the Sydney Opera House in April, moved to the Regent Theatre in Melbourne through 16 June, and played the Lyric Theatre at QPAC in Brisbane from 15 to 22 August. The Opera Australia Orchestra under Nigel Gaynor covered Sydney; Orchestra Victoria under Jessica Gethin took Melbourne.

Critics split on the same production in the same week. A Bachtrack review of the 24 April performance, with Grace Carroll and Joseph Caley, gave four stars and argued the partnering was too careful to convince as adolescent recklessness, while conceding the sword fights were still thrilling. A Limelight notice of the 27 April performance ran to five stars and called the work a near-perfect alignment of music, choreography and design, singling out Rose's forced-perspective painted backdrops, relit by Jason Morphett, and the brass playing. That performance also marked Callum Linnane's last appearances with the company, dancing opposite Sharni Spencer. From Melbourne came praise for Gethin's conducting and the carnival scenes, and one specific complaint: the floor space given to the Capulet ball is cramped.

Cranko's version then crosses to Toronto. The National Ballet of Canada runs it from 31 October to 8 November 2026 at the Four Seasons Centre as part of the company's 75th-anniversary season, reproduced and staged by Reid Anderson and Yseult Lendvai from Jane Bourne's 1993 Benesh notation score, with sets and costumes by Susan Benson and lighting by Robert Thomson. The company first danced Cranko's Romeo in Montreal on 14 April 1964; the 1973 costumes were lost in a fire, so the current designs are a rebuild rather than a restoration. The last Toronto outing was at the O'Keefe Centre in 2006, the final ballet staged there before the move.

New readings: Philadelphia and the Armory

Philadelphia Ballet gave the year's most substantial new choreography. Juliano Nunes, the company's resident choreographer, staged his version at the Academy of Music from 30 April to 10 May 2026, with costumes by Youssef Hotait, lighting by Brad Fields and the Philadelphia Ballet Orchestra in the pit. Oksana Maslova and Arian Molina Soca led, with Federico D'Ortenzi as Mercutio, Pau Pujol as Tybalt, Javier Rivet as Benvolio and Natalie Patel as Lady Capulet.

The reading, as Ballet Herald's Lauren Berlin described it, puts the weight on escalation rather than romance — public violence, loyalty and grief, one rupture setting off the next — with a classical vocabulary pushed into something angled, weighted and rhythmically insistent. The balcony duet was the exception, built on partnering that reads as weightless. Hotait's costumes sit somewhere between Renaissance structure and Victorian line.

Benjamin Millepied's Romeo & Juliet Suite, danced by L.A. Dance Project, took the opposite route: 80 minutes, Prokofiev's suite rather than the full score, and a three-week run at the Park Avenue Armory in New York from March 2026. François-Pierre Couture's design was stripped to concrete, mirrors, red light and glowing sword props; a camera operator, Sébastien Marcovici, followed dancers through the Armory's corridors with the feed projected at cinema scale. Casting is gender-flexible, so the central pair may be two men, two women or a man and a woman while keeping the character names — on 18 March the leads were David Adrian Freeland Jr. and Morgan Lugo. Berlin again reviewed it, and found the staging inventive but the drama thinned out by cutting the motivation, repetitive where it wanted to build.

On sale now

The nearest performances are Ballet Arizona's, 22 to 25 October 2026 at Symphony Hall in Phoenix: six shows across four days, including Saturday and Sunday matinees, in Ib Andersen's choreography with the Phoenix Symphony playing Prokofiev live. The company bills it as one of Andersen's strongest pieces of work and runs a Studio Spotlight rehearsal event on 9 October plus free pre- and post-show talks with dancers.

After that comes Toronto from 31 October. Then, in January 2027, New York City Ballet takes Ratmansky's 2011 staging into its own repertory for the first time — a company premiere opening 19 January at the David H. Koch Theater, with 14 performances through 31 January, using Richard Hudson's designs. The Royal Ballet's MacMillan version, which passed its 60th anniversary in 2025, reaches cinemas through the 2026/27 relay season in a recording made on 20 March 2025 with Vadim Muntagirov, Fumi Kaneko and Koen Kessels conducting.