Romeo and Juliet. Photo: Todd Rosenberg
Romeo and Juliet. Who doesn’t know their story? I wonder if Shakespeare ever imagined that people would be talking about it almost 400 years later. The story of the ill-fated love between two teenagers separated due to the hatred between their families.
The opera starts at a party, where Lord Capulet is about to announce the engagement of his daughter Juliet, to the Count of Paris. Among a sea of guests wearing beautiful dresses and headpieces in sober colors, Juliet appears in a pink, tulle dress drowning in glitter, like a princess from a fairy tale. Juliet is a happy young girl, willing to please her father. However, Lord Capulet overlooked the one thing that always seems to ruin a party: the party-crashers. And not just any party-crasher. It’s Romeo — the Montague’s son, a rival family — and a bunch of his friends. Among them, Mercutio — the troublemaker who will lose his life in a duel — and Stefano — a character that is absent from Shakespeare’s original that Gounoud invented to comply with the demands of the Parisian opera of the time, which required a certain number of voice types. Stefano, played by the French mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa, took the night’s loudest ovation. At the end of the first act, Romeo and Juliet look at each other for the first time…and the rest is history.
Gounoud’s romantic, and at time humorous music, in the wonderful voices of Joseph Calleja, the Maltese tenor, and the American soprano Susanna Phillips, fills the theater with love. I almost see little hearts floating everywhere. The lover’s passion increases with each duet, and what starts with tenderness, ends in desperation. The line ‘hatred is the cradle of this ill-fated love’, bounces off the walls once and again.
Romeo and Juliet, knowing that their families will never allow them to be together, decide to do what teenagers often do: whatever they want, without considering the consequences. During their wedding night — the only one they’ll spend together — Juliet refuses to acknowledge the lark’s song — which announces daybreak — insisting it’s a nightingale — the bird of the night — since she doesn’t know when she’ll get to see Romeo again.
Needless to say, things don’t turn out as expected. Juliet incessantly declares that ‘the grave will be her wedding bed’, predicting the end of the story. She’d rather stab herself with a dagger, than living without her Romeo. An ideal opera for first-time goers, it fascinates due to its sober and minimalist set, emphasizing the costumes, choreography and the actor’s performance. Among duets, duels and sermons, the lovers triumph embraced in death. And although the ending is tragic, I’m thrilled to know that Romeo and Juliet’s love continues and will live forever.
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Carolina Herrera Guerra was born in Monterrey, Mexico and raised in Mexico City. This year she will publish her first novel #Mujer que piensa. She lives in Aurora, IL with her husband and children.
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Romeo and Juliet
Lyric Opera
Until March 19