Feud and fiddlesticks: ISO lavishes Prokofiev upon 'Romeo and Juliet'
Filling in the current gap in the music directorship of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Jun Märkl has duties as artistic advisor I'm not privy to, though it's clear he permits himself to don a provisional music director's mantel from time to time.
The current weekend devoted to Sergei Prokofiev's ballet score for "Romeo and Juliet" is an excellent example, and it will be succeeded next week by a program in similar format that will bring extra stage life to Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music to "A Midsummer Night's Dream." There are so many ways a Shakespeare festival can be done, and this is the ISO's version as it brings its current Hilbert Circle Theatre season to a close.
The Russian composer had difficulty bringing off an acceptable version for the ballet, as the ISO's program notes explain. He fashioned three orchestral suites from the engaging music he created for dancers to interpret, and concert performance of excerpts is the norm.
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| ISO guest: actor-director Kim Martin-Cotten |
tragedy set among Prokofiev's inspirations, which bring to the fore his melodic gift, his dramatic instincts, and his savoir-faire as an orchestrator. The conductor has moved the excerpts around to where he feels they fit. The ISO brought in a widely experienced stage director, Kim Martin-Cotten, to guide a handful of actors through portions of the play amid the music.
The musical excerpts are cleverly chosen for their aptness to the drama's different stages, which are set up by what the orchestra plays, or sometimes confirmed immediately by the music following the dialogue. Occasionally there are snippets of underscoring — music behind dialogue, as in a movie. On Friday night, the ISO was in fine fettle, occasionally too sharp-elbowed where some rounded contours would have been more apt, but otherwise dependably colorful and rhythmically vivacious.
Most questionable is that what Prokofiev wrote for the death of Tybalt is put behind the death of Mercutio. That's Romeo's imaginative chum, whose quips run right up into his death by sword, which the actor playing him (Benjamin Bonenfant) earlier calls a fiddlestick (after Shakespeare) in directly addressing concertmaster Kevin Lin. That was a cute theatrical break in "the fourth wall," and less a puzzle than the character's having something close to a nervous breakdown in his fanciful Queen Mab speech.
It's Romeo's response to Mercutio's death that leads to Tybalt's dispatch shortly thereafter. Juliet's cousin is a hothead, and his duel with the tragedy's hero is an essential rekindling of the Capulet-Montague feud, proscribed by the Prince. The fatal quarrel sends Romeo into exile from Verona and triggers the tragedy. The death of Tybalt is supremely well-represented by the music Prokofiev wrote for that event; one should remain linked with the other.
Sporadically rushing up to the stage from the aisles or from the wings, the extraordinary cast, precisely amplified and keen to make every expression and gesture suit what was said, never faltered in either the poetry or the meaning of the text. The frequent use of couplets calls for delivery that must avoid the sing-songy, but there's no point hiding the rhymes when they are so much a part of Shakespeare, especially in his early plays. Martin-Cotten got this right from her actors, keyed to the performances of Paul Deo Jr. and Jessica Andrews in the title roles.
The balcony scene had the inevitable plus of there being a real balcony in the hall, though the audience had to remind itself to ignore the one patron sitting — out of the spotlight, to be sure — not far from the freshly impassioned Juliet.
Three actors well-known on local stages were well employed here. Adam O. Crowe played the deep-toned, sensible Friar Laurence, whose sage-like manner is nonetheless undercut by his ill-conceived escape advice to the young couple. Jaddy Ciucci is Benvolio, the shrewed, loyal companion to Romeo, a fitting contrast to the flamboyant Mercutio. Daniel Martin is the thin-skinned, feisty Tybalt, and played the family pride of the Capulets to the hilt.
The opposition of Juliet's parents to their daughter's devotion to the scion of their enemy is summed up in the portrayal of Heidi Armbruster as both the senior Capulets. She gets the dad's lines too, and there's no doubt that the blending of the couple makes the feud seem as hot and current as it needs to be. The gabby, lovingly intrusive Nurse was memorably enacted by Lisa Tejero, who doubled as the no-nonsense Prince, determined to end the feud-prolonged civil disorder by any means necessary.
Shakespeare showed the way the personal almost inevitably interacts with the political, particularly when the persons involved are prominent in their world. Accommodating himself to Stalinism at its height, Prokofiev knew how to get the imagination lost in an appealing story of conflict and ennobling defeat.
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