It's just that they knew what constituted good ballets, what moved the audience, even with diffrerent musicalities. I can at least say MacMillan's Manon, performed by the Royal Ballet in 2005 at Tokyo was fairly impressive. The girl sitting next me was shedding tears when Manon died in Act 3.
The question I want to ask is, for instance, did Ashton or MacMillan ever allow thier company to perform with recorded music, as Neumeier frequently does with his Hamburg Ballet? Does Neumeier really know the good from the bad concerning music?
For the record here is why I didn't like his R&J (performed by the Royal Danish Ballet, May 23 2009, at Tokyo):
1. Group dances of Act 1 and Act 2 were too "contemporary" (and thus became easily obsolete 38 years after the production), and their contributions to the narration of the story were almost none.
2. Neumeier altered Prokofiev's music Dance of the Knights of Act1, the most famous part of R&J, with its ending meaninglessly prolonged. He was audacious enough to challenge the Prokofiev's original score and the result was just a disaster.
3. Neumeier loves to open the stage curtain with no music at all, and did again in Act 3 of his R&J. He may claim it is based on his study of Noh, but it wasn't impressive to me. It is, after all, a denial of the role of the music.
4. (This may be a fault of Nikolaj Hübbe, the director of RDB) In Act 2, the orchestra stopped playing and the Dance of the mandolins was performed with recorded music. Hübbe might have thought that the audience of Tokyo were deaf and they would not realize such trick.
5. (also likely to be a fault of Hübbe) They dropped confetti and hand-clapped (to self-applause) in Napoli a week ago, and they did the same in Remeo and Juliets. I wonder if such procedures were commonly used in the good tradition of ballet. Once might be tolerable, but when it came twice, it just stinked.
So it looks to me as if Neumeier were attempting to become Hegel or Marx of the ballet history, and Hübbe delightfully played his role as Lenin. (Napoli was fine, though.)