By Kathy Valin
Enquirer contributor

On opening night, romance, adventure and tragedy filled artistic director Victoria Morgan's 2001 Romeo and Juliet, re-staged last weekend by Cincinnati Ballet.

Under Carmon DeLeone's baton, Sergei Prokofiev's colorful orchestral score - by turns playful, urgent, strident and haunting in its jazzy harmonies - kept the large cast in constant motion.

Leads Kristi Capps and Dimitri Trubchanov danced a modern version of love at first sight, visceral in its passionate discovery. They meet at an Italian Renaissance ball - true to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet - eyes locking under Thomas Hase's spotlight, while the rest of the world stands still.

Unfortunately, that tumultuous world holds the Capulets and Montagues, dueling feudal families, who are soon at each other's throats.

As Juliet, Capps poignantly develops from a carefree child clutching her favorite doll into a woman willing to give her life for her Romeo, danced with brashness and tenderness by Trubchanov. The ballet's loveliest dancing is found in their pas de deux, especially in the balcony scene, when Romeo declares his love.

After the two are secretly married by Frederic Franklin's Friar, they share a night marred by Romeo's waking realization that he must flee Verona. In a series of escalating encounters in the Market Square, the contentious Tybalt (played to belligerent perfection by Jay Goodlett) has killed Mercutio, and Romeo has exacted revenge on his cousin by marriage.

But Juliet will not let him leave, and for the first and last time they dance together with the intimacy of husband and wife.

Standouts included Romeo's buddies Mercutio (Michael Wardlaw) and Benvolio (Andrey Kasatsky) who set just the right note of bravado and camaraderie. Wardlaw, who played his death scene to the hilt, combined agile dancing with incisive acting. As Carnival Troubadours, Zack Grubbs, Cheryl Sullivan, Tricia Sundbeck and Benjamin Wardell tumbled over and around each other dressed in bright tatters.

Regina Cerimele-Mechley provided comic ballast as Juliet's nurse. Frank R. Johnson, as a Capulet, jumped as if there was no gravity into a perfect split.

And Romeo's one-armed lifts swirling the ecstatic Juliet up and around him, her languid, yielding backbends away from him gave terrible poignancy to his efforts to dance with her limp form in the crypt scene.

This was a long, emotionally demanding ballet which earned a stading ovation.