The Butterfly Lovers—ancient China’s Romeo and Juliet—have had multiple movies, television shows, musicals, stage dramas, popular songs, every kind of opera, a theme park dedicated to them, and finally, two millennia on, a ballet. It shouldn’t have taken this long, given that the story is made for ballet. The legend combines Romeo and Juliet’s star-crossedness with Bright Stream’s comic crossdressing, Giselle’s peasant-aristocrat transgressions and graveyard resurrections, and Swan Lake’s lovers joined after death (as everlasting butterflies). For this 2024 premiere, the Hong Kong Ballet pulled out all the stops, with an original score (performed live by the New York City Ballet Orchestra under the baton of the prodigious Kuokman Lio for this occasion) and a proliferation of gorgeous costumes and sets by Tim Yip, of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon renown. That the choreography is by a former company dancer and, since 2019, its resident choreographer is also a promising sign. The Jiangxi-born Ricky Song Wei Hu will know the beloved story and the fine dancers by heart. —Apollinaire Scherr