Romeo And Juliet: The Play/Concert

[YouOverThere]

Apparently, last season the Baltimore Symphony combined with a theater company to produce A Midsummer Night's Dream with the orchestra performing Mendelssohn's incidental music. This season they tried again with Romeo and Juliet, performing an abridged version of Shakespeare's play accompanied by Prokofiev's music. IMHO, it was less than successful.

There were several deficiencies from my perspective. The biggest obviously was that neither the dialogue nor the music were created to be background. In this production, the dialogue won out, with the music used like a movie soundtrack (and not in a dominant role as in, for example, Alexander Nevsky). To make matters worse, the actors were amplified, often to the point of nearly drowning out the music. I consider the final 3.5 minutes of Prokofiev's music to not only be some of the most beautiful music ever written but also extremely contemplative and in no need of explanation. So it was annoying to have an actor (playing the Prince of Verona) delivering a sermon during that portion of the music (I still have memories of many in the audience, including men, reaching for kleenex during the finale of the Colorado Ballet's production of Romeo and Juliet a few years ago).

Another problem (at least for me) is that they used a very small cast, with many members playing several parts. This not only resulted in a single actor reciting both sides of a conversation, but also in some very incongruous casting, with a man playing Juliet's nurse (while wearing a tuxedo!) and a woman playing Tybalt.

[dirac]

Thank you for telling us about the performance, YouOverThere. It's not uncommon for actors to double up on roles in Shakespeare, but it shouldn't be a distraction!