By Dave Read, July 11, 2025 performance – And now for something entirely different! Romeo and Juliet: A Theatrical Concert for Orchestra was on the bill tonight at Tanglewood’s Koussevitsky Music Shed, where the enthusiastic reaction from the audience indicates it was a big hit. BSO music director Andris Nelsons conducted the orchestra, Bill Barclay adapted and directed the theatrics.
At the core of the program was Romeo & Juliet, Opus 64, a ballet composed by Sergei Prokofiev, during the years when Stalin interfered with the arts in Russia the way a fugitive from justice does here.
This was amusing, light entertainment; with Shakespeare’s text reduced to the essential action of the doomed love story. Most of the best-known lines were kept, but heard only with some difficulty, partly due to acoustics but mostly because the actors employed a more conversational tone than a declamatory one, which I feel would have suited the setting better.
The theatrical part, itself, was a component of the very big, bright, orchestral conversation. I would think, therefore, that the spoken, textual parts should be leaned into as if they were instrumental solos – so that it plays like a theatrical concerto.
The program notes mention that the unhappy ending of Shakespeare’s play made it unacceptable to the dictates of “Soviet Realism,” where every ending must be a happy one. Informed the censors wouldn’t approve the Bard’s scenario, a determined Prokofiev responded by having Romeo appear a minute before Juliet’s demise, saying “Living people can dance, but the dead cannot dance lying down.”
Although we’re living under another terrible reign, one unfazed by death, whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or Texas, neither lover died tonight, even though both swallowed poison!