Love is love. If you want just three words to sum up Romeo and Juliet Suite, they’re the ones. 

Benjamin Millepied’s thrilling dance work, set to selections from Prokofiev’s mighty ballet score, is ultimately that basic and that profound. Who loves whom is a personal matter. That humans are capable of intense feeling and overwhelming desire is the thing.

Familiarity with Prokofiev and Shakespeare isn’t a must but is a bonus, especially when it comes to the music. The score is a marvel of rich storytelling and Millepied follows its path with a stimulating mix of dance, drama and cinematic images. Theatricality and something closer to realism work in tandem to visceral effect.

This tightly condensed and abstracted version of the tragedy goes nowhere near fair Verona. The named characters are ruthlessly pruned to just Romeo, Juliet, Tybalt and Mercutio, who are placed with a small band of friends and foes in a fluid, kind-of-anywhere dream world that tips easily into nightmare. 

From the start a cameraman (Sebastien Marcovici, superb) unobtrusively follows the action, taking the viewer from stage to backstage to outside. A live video feed brings key moments to a huge screen on which images are multiplied, enlarge a private moment, take the audience into the thick of the action or give an unusual perspective.

In the theatrical coup of the evening Romeo and Juliet flee the theatre for their passionate dance of commitment, the camera swirling around them against the peerless backdrop of one of the Sydney Opera House shells. 

At the other end of the emotional spectrum Romeo corners Tybalt in one of the House’s more grim, secluded backstage areas as payback for Mercutio’s killing. It’s brutal.

And sometimes there is just the auditorium, the stage and the superlative L.A. Dance Project dancers.

Millepied knows his way around the classical vocabulary and uses it fluently but isn’t averse to colouring outside the lines. The artistic director of L.A. Dance Projects, he is a former principal artist with New York City Ballet and briefly led Paris Opera Ballet (he apparently found it too hidebound). 

His choreography speaks of a deep understanding of ballet, which he here gives a sexy, earthy quality, and a love for contemporary shapes and energy. The fusion works seamlessly and the dancers eat it up.

Lorrin Brubaker was the dead-eyed, preening Tybalt and Shu Kinouchi the super-sharp, fleet, vivid Mercutio. Both were wonderful as was the rest of the company. You could call them the corps de ballet, one supposes, if you wanted to put that label on such an individual group of dancers.

As for the leads, first-night honours went to David Adrian Freeland Jr as a magnetic, dynamic Romeo with the silken Mario Gonzalez as a complex, moving Juliet in this male/male pairing. You’d have to be made of stone not to feel their joy and pain.

Gender simply isn’t an issue in the context of this work and Millepied doesn’t play favourites, unless you count the hard-working Freeland as one. He has another show with Gonzalez and partners the Juliet of Audrey Sides at two other performances.

There is also a female/female leading cast. Love is love. 

Romeo and Juliet Suite has now concluded its Sydney season. This review first appeared in The Australian on June 6.