Romeo and Juliet: Music, Opera, Dance and Drama (2002)

Richard Rose

Richard Rose

Richard Rose was the Artistic Director of Necessary Angel Theatre until 2002, a company he founded in 1978. He has also directed at many of the major theatres in Canada, including the Stratford Festival, the Canadian Stage Company, the Great Canadian Theatre Company, the National Arts Centre, Buddy's in Bad Times Theatre, and Tarragon Theatre, where he became the Artistic Director in 2002. In an interview with Eye magazine, Rose states that his artistic goals at Necessary Angel Theatre were "to look at the contradictions, to look at paradox and people wrestling with desire and personal history and politics. I guess I look for a certain three-dimensionality of experience" (Quoted in the Encyclopedia of Canadian Theatre). Rose's adaptation of Romeo and Juliet (2002) attempts just such a "three-dimensionality of experience" through its mixing of different performance styles and genres in order to rework and complicate those theatrical forms for a contemporary Canadian theatre-going public.

The Rose production of Romeo and Juliet was a collaborative project by Ballet Jorgen, the Canadian Opera Company, the Stratford Festival of Canada and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. It typifies the postmodern "pastiche" form with its mélange of different styles and genres that patches together selections from Bernstein's musical, Gounod's ballet, Prokofiev's operatic, and Shakespeare's dramatic version of Romeo and Juliet along with Tchaikovsky's orchestral music. The effect, ostensibly, is to cross and undermine the cultural and artistic boundaries of value and historical distance that once separated these different styles and genres, thus creating a new and unique contemporary theatrical form. Even the company's name, MODD (Music, Opera, Drama, Dance), sounds like a nostalgic postmodern reference to an earlier cultural vogue of the 1960s that has also been revived and incorporated into contemporary pop-culture.

According to the Canadian Opera Company 's website, this juxtaposition of different versions of Romeo and Juliet from opera, dance, drama and musical theatre "allows audiences to experience the same story from different perspectives [even though, according to the blurb,] the emotions each inspires are remarkably similar" (COC website, 2003). The striving for (or perhaps forcing of) harmony and universal thematics amongst discord and complexity is perhaps a recognizable Canadian theme binding together this unique collaboration of high-profile Canadian performing-arts companies.

Another such Canadianism is the production's bilingual (English and French) score––the opera sections are sung entirely in French and for the most part repeat scenes dramatized elsewhere in the play in English. The dramatic sections are lifted directly from either quarto or folio versions of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet . There is nothing "new" here, except for Rose's uniquely postmodern bricolage of older materials. The result, however, is that his Romeo and Juliet is a much shorter and more "simplified" version of the story compared to any one of the other versions Rose used to assemble his.

What is interesting about this adaptation is the extent to which the "traditional" story seemingly needed to be edited in order to tie together all of its different interpretations, translations, and versions into a unified "whole." In fact, the play could be described as a revue of the "big scenes" from its collected Romeo and Juliets that, at times, briefly points to larger ideological and ethical themes, but focuses almost solely on the tragic love story and ends with the deaths of Romeo and Juliet staged as a dance. This strained simulacral unity is thus a glimpse, not into the universality of the "timeless" story of Romeo and Juliet , but rather into the historical and contextual specificity of each one of its adaptations, even when one of those versions uses the "traditional" words and stage directions laid out by Shakespeare for the "original" production.

Don Moore

Download Script
Link to Database
Link to An Interview with Richard Rose

CASP gratefully acknowledges Richard Rose's permission to publish this play to its website.