A BLUE-SKY BALLET
WITH A DARK HEART

John Neumeier turns a brutal tale of
love, violence and redemption into an
exquisite and haunting ballet

Jose Pablo Castro Cuevas and Victoria Jaiani

The first thing you notice on stage when you walk into the theater is a small slice of startling blue sky in a sea of grey: a window into a different world. It’s highly apropos to the story that will follow. Liliom, the 1909 play by Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár, has been adapted several times to other media, including eight movies (that I’m aware of), radio plays, and most famously, as the musical Carousel, long considered to be one of the greatest musicals ever made.

John Neumeier’s ballet of Liliom premiered in Hamburg in 2011. Featuring a gorgeous score by Michel Legrand, the ballet has been performed stateside before by touring companies, but the Joffrey’s exquisite new production, now being performed at the Lyric Opera House, marks the first time it has been performed by an American company.

The Joffrey Ballet Ensemble

Neumeier’s adaptation scrambles the chronology of the narrative slightly, opening with a carnival in ruins. Liliom (Valentino Moneglia Zamora) has spent sixteen years in purgatory. He is given a chance to return to Earth to perform one good deed. It’s the price he needs to pay. Bringing down a star with him as a gift for his son Louis (Hyuma Kiyosawa), Liliom attempts a reconciliation. But to Louis, he is a stranger. Louis refuses the gift, Liliom loses his temper and, in a wonderfully choreographed movement, strikes the child.

Jose Pablo Castro Cuevas and Laila Madison

We flash back to the past. During the Great Depression, Liliom is the studly carnival barker for a carousel whose owner, Mrs. Muscat (Lucia Connolly), is his lover. His sex appeal is a powerful marketing tool, and he flirts with abandon, drawing women to him and, by extension, to the carousel. Then one evening he encounters Julie (Gayeon Jung) and falls in love. In a jealous rage, Mrs. Muscat fires Liliom, leaving him without a job or any prospects. To make matters worse, Julie informs Liliom that she is pregnant. Deliriously happy while simultaneously terrified of the future, Liliom succumbs to the influence of a ne’er-do-well acquaintance and agrees to participate in a robbery. The money will secure his child’s future.

As we already know from the prologue, things do not go as planned.

Jose Pablo Castro Cuevas and Reed Henry

Liliom follows the plot of the play quite faithfully with two significant changes. One involves changing the sex of the child. In the original, Julie bears Liliom a daughter. Changing the child to a boy leads to one of the most emotional sequences in the ballet, when a despondent Liliom imagines a future with his boy when he is grown. Zamora and Kiyosawa do a beautiful pas de deux that is as exhilarating as it is heartbreaking because we know what Liliom does not: this future will never come to pass for him.

Evan Boersma and Reed Henry

The other is the introduction of a character called the Balloon Man (Evan Boersma), Liliom’s guide from purgatory back to Earth, a sort of psychopomp in reverse. But Neumeier’s stroke of genius is to make the Balloon Man omnipresent. No matter the scene or the temper of the movement, the Balloon Man moves unhurriedly across the stage. Sometimes he’s in the distant background, sometimes he’s right up front, briefly obscuring the dancers, a constant reminder of mortality and the vicissitudes of fate.

It’s an incredible motif because this ballet, for all its exuberance, leans strongly into the harshness of the era. Worker riots, starvation, and the frustrations and anger of the unemployed get as much attention as the romantic shenanigans, making for a somber evening.

Victoria Jaiani and Reed Henry

As would be expected of the company, the dancers are all superb. Zamora is excellent as the cocky carnival barker who has the ladies hanging off his every movement. His chemistry with Connolly’s Mrs. Muscat is electric, and their dance together is one of the sexiest things I’ve seen on stage. Connolly was my favorite performer that evening. Even standing still off-center, glaring at Liliom and Julie, she owns the stage. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

Victoria Jaiani and Sam Farster

Zamora struggles a bit in the shift from stud to unemployed man but finds his groove just in time for the aforementioned pas de deux with Kiyosawa, who is delightful. The Lyric Opera Orchestra, conducted by Nicholas Koo, is in splendid form and is complemented by the Rob Parton Big Band, which performs on an elevated platform at the back of the stage. Legrand’s blend of symphonic and jazz writing gives the ballet a musical world as restless as its characters.

Grim subject matter notwithstanding, the Joffrey’s Liliom is a feast for the senses. The stunning set is by Ferdinand Wögerbauer, and the shifting lighting design is by Jim French and Neumeier. I am not a sentimental person by nature, but I found this almost unbearably moving, in the best possible way. It’s a tragic tale, beautifully and evocatively told.

But of all the visual magic on the Lyric stage, what will stay with me is the sequence of Louis growing up, seeing him laugh, cry, and love, all while his father watches over him from that little piece of blue, blue sky.

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photos by Cheryl Mann

Liliom
The Joffrey Ballet
Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Upper Wacker Dr. in Chicago
reviewed on September 20; ends on Sept. 27, 2026
2 hours and 20 minutes, including intermission
for tickets, call 312.386.8905 or visit Joffrey

for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago

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