Long time mover, first time shaker here, to say that Ballet is actually pretty neat! With a story that's easy to parse, its like you're attending a silent movie.
The dance is full of trembling and swaggering, and brief moments of flight and pantomime. The chaos of battle, and the clownish sequences, and the societal dances are all filled with details and scenes within each other. I especially liked the group of children forming their own little parade during the carnivalesque before Mercutio's end.
Musical highpoint was definitely the March of the Nights Sequence, it turns out it actually is serious and imposing if you have bass instruments belting it out.
The story gives a lot of interiority to Juliet, and is set within her domestic sphere, a pseudo fascist family, draped over in black. Romeo's lot seems to be that of an adventurer, wandering with a quasi Romani family, harassed by the Capulets, the patriarch only appearing to bookend the story.
Perhaps the main tragedy is so well known, that what really tickled my crying bones was Mercutio's death. Like Tosca, where everyone thinks he is overacting, the tough guy who didn't get a scratch on him. Wounds are hidden, but not for long.
This is perhaps one of the most virulently anti Zebra stories ever danced. Two herds, stampeding at one another, innocents trampled along with the guilty. Prokofiev, more like Bite-Off-He-Head. You know, like a carniv-