ROMEO AND JULIET
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Likewise, Romeo and Juliet has been given many operatic settings, but few of them have been successful adaptations. In fact, there are no operas based on a Shakespeare play that can in any real sense be said to capture the poetic essence of the original, however close they stay to the plot outline (and few manage even the refinement of Cliff Notes). Yet even if you strip a Shakespeare play down to its plot in the broadest sense of the word, you are still left with a story that is loaded with conflict and drama–perfect stuff for the opera house. Verdi’s greatest operas–those in which the music and the drama are so magnificently intertwined that one is as important as the other–are both based on plays by Shakespeare: Otello and Falstaff.
Only three operas based on Romeo and Juliet are still being performed with anything approximating regularity: Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi, Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. (Though some would scoff at my calling West Sidle Story an opera, that’s what it is, as Bernstein’s recording of the work four years ago with an operatic cast demonstrated.)
All of the roles in this splashy production were very well sung and easily understood, but special mention must be made of mezzo-soprano Carol Madalin in the trouser role of Romeo’s page Stephano, a character added by librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carre. She stole the second act with her brief but gorgeously sung aria, which is meant to arouse the Capulet household, and then followed with an impressive display of swordsmanship. The ensuing fights between Mercutio and Tybalt (baritone Stephen Lusmann and tenor Jeff Martin) and Romeo and Tybalt, choreographed by Tim Frawley, were very well staged even by theatrical standards.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Dan Rest.
