To say Julie is naïve is an understatement, but it’s really her goodness that gets her into trouble. One of two lead characters in the Joffrey Ballet’s season opener, Julie (on Thursday, danced by prima ballerina Victoria Jaiani) falls for a bad boy and is left to deal with the consequences. The subject of her affection is Liliom (José Pablo Castro Cuevas), a carnival barker whose primary talent is persuasion. When that falls short, Liliom’s life quickly devolves, leaving audiences to wonder if bad deeds are a question of character or circumstance.
Both, as it turns out, which leaves Julie with hard choices about whether and how to move on. Choreographer John Neumeier’s ballet, however, is called “Liliom,” not “Julie.” Thus, its Midwest premiere — and the first production of it ever to be mounted by a North American dance company — doesn’t meddle much with the trope of a woman who stands by her (very) imperfect partner. Instead, it interrogates whether a man can truly control his destiny. In the pursuit, I honestly didn’t think Castro Cuevas could get better than his most recent performance as Eugene Onegin. I was wrong.
Neumeier first created the piece 15 years ago for the Hamburg Ballet in Germany, where he was artistic director and chief choreographer for more than 50 years. But he was born and raised in Milwaukee and is a Chicagoan at heart. Neumeier launched his professional career on the Lyric Opera’s stage. That was in 1961; he was a dancer in the world premiere of Vittorio Giannini’s “The Harvest,” a piece pumped by the Ford Foundation to promote American opera. He didn’t return to the Lyric until 2017, when a new production of “Orphée et Eurydice” marked a novel collaboration between the opera company and the Joffrey Ballet (which, in hindsight, foreshadowed the Joffrey’s move from the Auditorium Theatre across town). But it was Neumeier’s “Sylvia” two years before that which marked Joffrey audiences’ first taste of his wild imagination.
Why does that matter? For one, Neumeier can be an acquired taste. Like “Sylvia” and “Orphée,” moments in “Liliom” can be head-scratchingly weird. His idiosyncratic movement style combines classical ballet, modern dance and emphatic physical theater, harkening back to his early training in Chicago with Sybil Shearer. To him, music is a paper map, not turn-by-turn directions, gratifyingly syncing only sometimes, but not always. He’s not afraid to ask an exquisite dancer with decades of training to just stand there holding a bunch of balloons.
In this case, that’s Evan Boersma, who on the surface portrays a white-faced carnival mime called The Balloon Man. He also functions as a kind of ghostly guide — Jacob Marley style — as Liliom voyages between Earthly and spiritual realms.
“Liliom” opens in silence with Boersma walking on his knees, toting a spectacular bundle of multi-colored balloons. The stage is otherwise pretty drab. Eventually, we see a somewhat downtrodden carnival called Playland as composer Michel Legrand’s magnificent score (superbly interpreted by conductor Nicholas Koo and the Lyric Opera Orchestra) begins to fill in. At first, it’s just strings. Is that little tinking sound a woodblock? English horn. Eventually, a lone trumpet.
The music and the dancing don’t remain this sparse for long. Boersma is joined by Reed Henry (who is simply terrific as Louis, Julie’s son), plus Liliom and Julie. Eventually, we learn this vignette is actually a flash forward to how this rather sad story ends. Once zipped back to the past, Playland is at its pinnacle. An actual big band stationed on a scaffold upstage evokes the roaring ‘20s. Stage dressings and costumes, by Neumeier, set designer Ferdinand Wogerbauer and lighting designer Jim French, establish the haves and the have-nots, with clear distinctions between carnival-goers, the fair’s owner/benefactor (on Thursday, the always-elegant Amanda Assucena) and working class carnies like Liliom and Julie, who is a waitress with friend, Marie (the lovely Natali Taht).
Liliom’s job is to get people to “step right up” to the carnival. He’s good at it, reaching quota primarily by wooing nearly every woman he encounters (including Assucena, who’s kind of his boss). Castro Cuevas gets the blend just right: Liliom is both a frequently shirtless, dashing womanizer and an insecure brooder with a dark side and a quick temper. When triggered, he nearly kills a drunk sailor at the carnival; he abuses Julie psychologically and, once, physically; and when he finds out he’s going to be a dad (at the height of the Great Depression, no less), he resorts to theft and commits suicide to avoid getting caught. (The story is the same that inspired Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical “Carousel.”)
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There were other ways Liliom could have handled that. In what is arguably the ballet’s climax, the Joffrey’s entire bench of 24 men performs as a spectacular corps de ballet, dancing out the frustration of being unable to find work when the 1920s crash into the ‘30s. In the lead-up, several of those men slowly pace the stage holding signs: “Work is what I want and not charity,” one says. “Who will help?”
Liliom obviously could have made different choices and not saddled Julie with a child and unimaginable grief. But it’s also clear he loved her and allowed himself a level of vulnerability with her which no one else got to see. Liliom wanted those other women to want him. With Julie, he wanted her and couldn’t measure up to the man he thought she should have.
Somehow, this ballet ends on a hopeful note, if for no other reason than Julie is a shining example of seeing the good in people even when they’re really disappointing. Is that naïve? Sure, yes. Definitely. But it’s a quality that, by the end of this ballet (which, in quintessential Neumeier fashion, is also the beginning), allows her to love her son unconditionally, too.
Lauren Warnecke is a freelance critic.
Review: “Liliom” (3.5 stars)
When: Through Sept. 27
Where: Joffrey Ballet at Lyric Opera of Chicago, 20 N. Wacker Drive
Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes with one intermission
Tickets: $39-$214 at 312-386-8905 and www.joffrey.org