Romeo on Three Levels

France was poor and the times were bad, but Catherine de Medici and her son King Henry III were throwing a royal wingding, and they were not a pair to pinch a franc. Catherine's valet de chambre, Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx, cooked up for the occasion a lavish combination of painting, music and dancing that is now rated as the first true ballet ever performed. The show began about 10:00 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 15, 1581 in the Grand Salle of the Hotel du Petit Bourbon in Paris, and lasted until 3:30 in the morning. There were some 10,000 spectators, and the archers of the King's Guard were posted to hold the best seats for people of importance.

In almost the same spot one night last week, helmeted members of the Garde Republicaine held seats for people of importance--British Ambassador Sir Gladwyn Jebb, Soviet Ambassador Sergei Vinogradov, ex-King Farouk. When they and some 8,000 others were seated, the production of ballet hit a height of splendor to satisfy a Medici.

Dancing Out the Love. Sponsor of the affair was the Comite Officiel des Fetes de Paris, which likes to start each tourist season with a cultural eye-opener. The committee began with the idea of using the Louvre's 3 1/2-acre Cour Carree, one side of which is dominated by a superb Renaissance clock tower. What could be more appropriate than to stage a version of the Renaissance tale of Romeo and Juliet? And what treatment of that theme could be more grandiose than French Composer Hector Berlioz' half-symphony, half-opera, written in 1839? Berlioz composed his work for a chorus and three solo voices, but they are minor roles--he gave neither Romeo nor Juliet a word to sing. The love of Romeo and Juliet was so sublime, he explained, and "its expression so full of danger for the composer that he . . . had recourse to the instrumental idiom, a richer, more varied, less limited language."

The committee decided to go Berlioz one better and use ballet to dance out the love he did not put into words. The old Marquis de Cuevas, 70, the world's biggest-spending balletomane, agreed to contribute his own ballet company to the project; the chorus and orchestra of the Concerts Colonne were engaged to work under Conductor Jean Martinon. The Louvre authorities, fearful of fire, were tougher to persuade: they held out for a full month, until the committee guaranteed to fireproof the outdoor stage, to station a fire truck at the entrance and a fireboat alongside in the Seine.

Dancing in the Window. The company had only a month to do the whole work, got together for rehearsals 14 days before opening. The performance was a superlative success. Under the softly hazy sky of a summer evening in Paris, the dancers spilled and splashed across the stage and the wide staircases. A second-story window in the Louvre, on a level with the top layer of the stage, served both as Juliet's balcony and the entrance to the Capulets' palace. The three-level arrangement provided scope for graceful choreographic invention. In a pas de deux, George Skibine danced the yearning Romeo on the lowest stage while his wife, Marjorie Tallchief, danced Juliet on the highest.

Basso Michel Roux of the Paris Opera performed commandingly as Friar Lawrence, and the orchestra and chorus sounded as good as could be expected through the amplifiers. At the finale, the audience rose and cheered. But it was the setting that really stole the show--Berlioz, ballet and baggage. As France-Soir summed it up the next day: "The Louvre was the biggest success of all."

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