The performance attended was a ballet, Romeo and Juliet, written by the twentieth-century Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. The ballet was presented at 8:00 pm on Friday, April 24, 1998 at the Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse. The ballet is based on the tragic play by William Shakespeare in which two lovers are separated by their fighting families. In their attempt to escape from their families Juliet pretends to be dead by taking a drug. Romeo, believing she is really dead, kills himself. Juliet, who wakes up and finds him dead, also kills herself. The highlights of the ballet, in addition to the relationship of Romeo and Juliet, are the fights between the members of their families and their friends.
The most striking thing about the music of this ballet is that, in many places, it is not typical dance music. There did not seem to be as much use of really emphatic rhythms as one might expect, and the dancers often seemed to find the rhythms in clusters of sound where it might not be obvious to anyone else. At times the music was quite frantic. This was especially true of the first big fight scene where one of the characters from Juliet's family's side is killed. Largely because the music was so violent that the dancers actually seemed to be fighting rather than dancing. This could probably vary a great deal according to the production and the choreography, but the music alone is so charged with contrasting sounds that seem to grate against each other that it might suggest fighting even if one did not know what it was supposed to represent.
One of the most interesting portions of the music was the piece that accompanies the balcony scene in which Romeo calls to Juliet. The music is romantic but has a strong, almost anxious, undercurrent that is created by the unusual use of the strings. This feeling comes from the melody that is played beneath the sort of call-and-response between Romeo's and Juliet's music. But ...