Review: LILIOM at Joffrey Ballet At The Lyric Opera Of Chicago

It is hard to overstate the excellence of The Joffrey Ballet. Since Mary B. Galvin Artistic Director Ashley Wheater’s appointment to the helm in 2007, the company has grown increasingly more versatile, adding pieces by leading contemporary ballet choreographers to its repertoire and demonstrating repeated mastery.

And mastery was what filled every corner of the stage at Friday evening’s performance of John Neumeier’s Liliom. Neumeier, a Milwaukee native whose formidable dance career began in that city and here in Chicago, is one of the great contemporary choreographers of ballet. In 2023, Chicago audiences were treated to his Glass Menagerie (Hamburg Ballet at the Harris Theater) and his Little Mermaid (Joffrey Ballet). Neumeier blends the classic idiom of ballet with more contemporary, folk, and theatrical movement vocabularies. The man himself utterly charmed the audience with a brief preshow tribute to Sybil Shearer, his early teacher and mentor and famed Chicago dancer/choreographer.

After his somewhat chillier Little Mermaid, the deeply melancholic but bursting Liliom feels the perfect fit for the 48-dancer Joffrey roster. The source material is Ferenc Molnár’s play of the same title; many audience members may be familiar with the work as the inspiration for Roger’s and Hammerstein’s musical Carousel.

We begin at the end, at the grounds of a dilapidated carnival, with a lone mime and an enormous bundle of balloons. This Balloon Man (Evan Boersma) functions as a guiding shadow from beyond and a specter of death. We see a young man, Louis (Hyuma Kiyosawa) and a shadowy figure who appears to him. Louis and this stranger quickly fall in together, dancing in beautiful synchronicity before the stranger tries to present Louis with a star, striking the young man when he is rebuffed. This is stranger is Liliom, Louis’s father, already dead and returned to earth to atone for his deeds. From this opener we spin backwards in time; the ruins of the carnival are restored to their former shine, and our story unfolds.

As Liliom, the dashing carnival barker of megawatt charisma and murky self-loathing, Valentino Moneglia Zamora is sensational. His lanky sensuality felt light as air, lending his sinuous lines and soaring battements a weightlessness. Impressive then how much tentativeness he conveyed as his relationship with the guileless Julie (Gayeon Jung, who possesses a strikingly open face but undergirds Julie with a stubborn steeliness) begins to deepen and grow. The scene in which these two characters struggle to convey their love to one another was exquisite for all the stillness that Neumeier finds, for the way their duet suggested playacting and the performance of romance but slowly took on a richer, more tender and uncertain understanding.

Zamora is also an excellent partner for Lucia Connolly’s Mrs. Muscat. Connolly appears to be having an utter ball as the delightfully vampy owner of the carousel, and their athletic duets depicting their trysts before Julie arrives on the scene are interwoven with bits of swing and social dance.

Speaking of swing, the score to Liliom too borrows from many idioms. The late Michel Legrand has furnished an appropriately cinematic score, and we are treated not only to the reliable excellence of members of the Lyric Opera Orchestra (conducted Friday by Nicholas Koo), but to the Rob Parton Big Band, which delivers the authentic brass sound of big band swing perched high on the rafters at the back of the stage.

One of the most stunning sequences of the evening came from the male Joffrey corps, performing as unemployed men waiting around the job agency, where Liliom ends up after being fired for choosing Julie over Mrs. Muscat. The uniformity of desperation as the ensemble flew through Neumeier’s tight passés and waves of falling to the floor and the light buoyant arabesques of the few who managed to get a job for the day was breathtaking.

The dancing is simply excellent, but so is the acting, from the principals to the corps. Lauren Quinn and Xavier Núñez (who appears to have loaded springs in place of feet) bring the comedic relief as Julie’s friend Marie and her boyfriend then husband Wolf Beifeld. Edson Barbosa makes a striking impression as Ficsur, the shady pal of Liliom who pushes him into the botched robbery that pushes Liliom to suicide when it fails. Barbosa radiates dangerous bravado in his rhythmic, almost step-inflected features, but we also glimpse Ficsur as he silently crosses onstage at the beginning of Act II, alone and weighed down by his very existence. And the ever-imposing Dylan Gutierrez stands out in his brief appearance as the arbiter of Liliom’s eternity, using all his height and precision to humorously deadpan effect. Underneath it all is the ensemble, essaying the ballet, the moments of folk dance, and swing on the marvelous Lyric Opera stage, replete with a starscape of lightbulbs and a working carousel.

Neumeier’s work often carries a deep interest in psychological interiority – so it goes with Liliom. That being said, the plot is the plot. The key moments of domestic violence remain, and your mileage may vary, like the man seated next to me who complained to his partner during intermission that Liliom “beats up his family before he dies and then again in the afterlife” and thus was not a good guy. Fair enough.

On Friday night though, I found myself deeply moved by the ending that Neumeier has fashioned. The program frames Liliom as a story of love, death, and redemption. We return, finally, to the beginning, running it back like a looping carousel, as father connects with son, loses him, and tries to atone. Call me sentimental, but Neumeier’s most stunning image, of the spectral shadows of the Balloon Man and the ghostly Liliom assist Louis in lifting his mother Julie aloft alongside the ever-present balloons, was deeply moving. Neumeier’s vision carries a deep melancholy, a moral ambivalence, and just enough hope to make his Liliom essentially human, and the excellent dancers of the Joffrey carry the challenge of this deeply felt work to a soaring heights.

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