Once again, the Western canon’s most famous paramours have traded soliloquies for pointe shoes.

For the final offering of its 2023 season, the San Francisco Ballet has revived an old favorite,former Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson’slush version of “Romeo and Juliet,” bringing Verona’s star-crossed lovers back to the stage of the War Memorial Opera House.

But how does the piece land when encountered through the prism of other art forms that are closely related but distinct? Chronicle theater critic Lily Janiak and classical music critic Joshua Kosman attended performances of the production’s opening weekend to report back.

Janiak:Let me start with a confession: I’m a relative newcomer to ballet. And even though I’m no Shakespeare purist, I was a bit skeptical about “Romeo and Juliet” in dance. Wouldn’t I miss the lush language? Isn’t that pretty much the point of the play?

Kosman:It’s the point of theplay, I think, but not the story. The story is merely a vehicle for Shakespeare’s language in one case and for Tomasson’s choreography in the other. What’s exciting about a production like this is to see the ways in which wordless movement can do the work here that iambic pentameter does in another context.

Janiak:是的!它是有益的对我从我word-centric universe. I have to admit that when the curtain went up on a bustling, even playful Renaissance town square, teeming with flirtatious young people, I wondered what had happened to the Verona of “Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?” — where a family feud permeates everything, inspiring hostility even between servants from the play’s very beginning?

But soon I realized that Tomasson was only heightening the stakes. He’s giving us a picture of what Verona could be were it unpoisoned by the beef between the Montagues and the Capulets, so that we feel its loss more acutely later.

Kosman:There’s something similar going on in Prokofiev’s magical orchestral score, which begins midway through a rising melodic phrase before setting into a sunny major key redolent of fairy tales. It’s notably different from Shakespeare’s sternly functional prologue.

Janiak:I was so struck by those opening notes! I thought, “Wait, this is still a tragedy, right?”

Kosman:As much as I enjoy seeing Shakespeare’s basic conceptions replicated onstage, it’s also fascinating to spot the points where characters and dramatic situations have to be reconfigured for a different context. Romeo and Juliet as dancing lovers can never be quite the dewy adolescents of the play. They’re too powerful and physically present for that.

Janiak:I disagree. I appreciated how Tomasson gave us Juliet as a child — one who scurries about, mouselike; who seeks shelter in the skirts of her nurse (Anita Paciotti); who would rather horse around than get married off. That felt honest to me — how inhumanely quickly this world forces its girls to become women.

Another striking moment was during the masquerade ball, when Romeo (Angelo Greco when I saw it on Friday, April 21; Joseph Walsh for you on Saturday, April 22) and Juliet (Jasmine Jimison for me; Misa Kuranaga for you) first lay eyes on each other. I loved how Tomasson stages the Capulet family dance; there’s so much severe pomp that it’s almost like an exercise of state power, and by dancing hand in hand with that crowd, Juliet and her intended, Paris (Steven Morse), are supposed to ensure the continuation of that power.

In my literal-mindedness, I thought for sure that the music would shift to underline that love-at-first-sight moment on the dance floor. But then when it didn’t, that choice made sense too: Even then, Romeo and Juliet can only steal glances and touches; they have to allow their world to keep turning and fly under the radar.

Kosman:As far as I’m concerned, the best part ofany“Romeo and Juliet” — theater, ballet, opera, film, anything — is Mercutio, that brazen, fearless fireball of wit and defiance. The combination of Prokofiev’s music and Tomasson’s extravagant, kinetic turns, beautifully executed by Cavan Conley (when I went), captures his spirit perfectly.

Janiak:我爱朱丽叶舞蹈wi的对比th Paris and when she dances with Romeo. In the former, she’s a pale, lifeless shadow, just going through the motions. In Jimison’s rendering, it was as if Juliet were about to dissolve into ghostliness. The latter has the zest of apparent spontaneity. The lovers pour themselves into each other, their bodies always finding different ways to beckon to each other, graft onto each other. Rather than dancing the same sequence physically apart but temporally in sync, each of these two must complete the other.

And as for the language, I never missed it. You don’t need to hear, “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” when Thomas R. Skelton’s lighting design bathes Juliet in her balcony in an incandescent, golden beam.

Kosman:Shakespeare’s work feels so inseparable from its language. The plots aren’t even his own. And yet sometimes the transformation can work even if the language gets lost along the way.

I think about this a lot in the realm of opera, where adaptations of Shakespeare arenumerous but rarely very successful. Charles Gounod’s mediocre opera of“Romeo and Juliet,”most notably, is a pale shadow of the original, because the music is such a poor substitute for Shakespeare’s poetry. It takes a composer as potent as Verdi or Benjamin Britten to compensate for that loss.

The joy of this production, at least for me, was to feel all that subtext coming at me in different nonverbal dimensions, musical and balletic.

Janiak:The subtext of the tomb scene alone packs a wallop. When Romeo discovers a Juliet he thinks is dead and, in this version, hoists her slack body to his chest, to try to dance with her one more time, the way they used to — I felt my own body convulse in horror and grief.

And what a perfect choice for ballet! The specific tragedy of death in this world is that we can’t dance any more.

Reach Lily Janiak and Joshua Kosman:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com,jkosman@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@LilyJaniak;@JoshuaKosman