Friday, July 11, 2025
8:00 PM
In collaboration with Bill Barclay’s Concert Theatre Works, Nelsons leads the BSO, vocal soloists, and actors in Romeo and Juliet: A Theatrical Concert for Orchestra and Actors, based on Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet.
Andris Nelsons, conductor
Concert Theatre Works
Bill Barclay, director
Kelley Curran (Juliet)
James Udom (Romeo)
Nigel Gore (Capulet)
Robert Walsh (Friar and Nurse)
Caleb Mayo (Mercutio)
Carman Lacivita (Tybalt)
PROKOFIEV selections from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited for clarity):
Brian McCreath I'm curious about Romeo and Juliet, because if I'm correct, this is the first treatment you've done of this play, and yet it's the most recognizable of Shakespeare's plays to just anybody that you catch on the street. So is it one that you imagine particularly difficult to produce, or is it that you are waiting to do on purpose for any particular reason?
Bill Barclay I did a 20-minute section at the Hollywood Bowl during a Shakespeare mashup performance called "Shakespeare at the Bowl" conducted by Bramwell Tovey, and the LA philharmonic did it. And that whet my appetite for doing the balcony scene with an orchestra on stage and the story. But admittedly I was a bit dumb to appreciate the integrative potential of doing an only-Prokofiev version with the Shakespeare. It's probably because I love it so much. I've conducted the Prokofiev in concert, my own version of the ballet and cutting the suites down. I love the music, I cherish the music. I wouldn't have naturally assumed that it would make a natural fit with the Shakespeare. And then when Boston and I started talking about doing this, the more I looked into it, I thought, what have we been waiting for? This is so juicy and wonderful and rich and it's surprisingly hand-meets-glove.
Brian McCreath I'm so interested that you just said it wouldn't naturally come to your mind that the Prokofiev and the Shakespeare would match up. Why is that? What led you to that instinctive feeling at first?
Bill Barclay Because it's a ballet. And because Prokofiev obviously knew his Shakespeare very well and loved it. There's so many colors from the poetry that are right there in his music, but he's written it for dance. And he hasn't written it to accompany text. And so the music is not incidental music. It's not like Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream where there's pausing for a speech and some of it is sparse enough for text to be over the music. It's not like that. It's full bore orchestra being the protagonist the whole time. And in this adaptation, for people who've seen my Peer Gynt and Midsummer Night's Dream in Boston, they might be expecting the bits of melodrama that I like to put in, melodrama, the old use of the word, which means speaking over music. You know, for 300 years of human history, if you were gonna do a production of Romeo and Juliet without an orchestra on stage, before the invention of loudspeakers, this would be an exercise in box office failure, right? We have hundreds of years of orchestra with actors doing these melodramatic Shakespeare productions, right? But Prokofiev didn't write that kind of music, and loving it as I do, I didn't know that it would kind of work with the play and the story this way. And as I started to play with it, it doesn't offer melodrama, instead it's movement, scene, movement, scene, movement, scene. But the truth is that they build off one another. And so once you've heard the balcony scene and then you hear the Romeo and Juliet love dance, it's almost too good to be true.
Brian McCreath That's amazing. So, really, your shift towards wanting to take this on resulted from knowing the score, as you say, of Prokofiev, but then just playing with those parts because you did select the scenes. It's not the complete Shakespeare play that people will see.
Bill Barclay That's right.
Brian McCreath And there's even a little bit of things coming out of order from the way they were presented in the ballet. So you needed to do that for dramatic reasons, I suppose.
Bill Barclay Yes, it's a bit of a puzzle and you have to solve it sometimes quite cleverly by taking things out of order and in many cases some of the scenes I've borrowed text from other scenes to make the scenes make sense. It's 75 minutes. We want the orchestra to have the most to say. So there's 40 minutes of them and 35 minutes of text. How do you tell the whole story in 35 minutes? Okay. The balcony scene alone in the uncut Shakespeare is nine minutes. So, what do you do? Do I take the approach of like, let's have one famous speech, orchestra playing, another famous speech orchestra playing another famous speech? That's the key temptation, sort of actors in tuxedos at music stands type thing. But that's not what I do. So could I really compress the story and give us just enough for us to follow the drama so that we believe in the stakes of the central characters so the music can hit hardest. And so I've really smooshed certain exposition scenes together in order for some of the most expansive famous poetry, the Queen Mab speech, et cetera, to have its full space without rushing.
Brian McCreath Do you feel like there's a dependence on anyone in the audience already knowing the story? Or if someone literally didn't know Romeo and Juliet, could they get the story basically from what you've done?
Bill Barclay I'm counting on people knowing the play.
Brian McCreath That's fair.
Bill Barclay They don't have to. I have made great efforts so that if you're coming to this for the first time, which I really believe in, I'm thinking about the 14-year-old student who hasn't maybe read it, or maybe was supposed to read it and didn't, and this is a story about them because they're two 14- year-old lovers. Most of the characters are young people. This is a story for young people, to be galvanized by classical music for the first time and understand Shakespeare for the first time. And so I care about the first time audience member who knows nothing about Prokofiev or Shakespeare, suddenly just getting hit in the chest with just the raw power of these two geniuses rowing together.
Brian McCreath I've got to think though that there will be some in the audience who definitely have heard of Romeo and Juliet, maybe even seen a production, at least seen West Side Story maybe, but they haven't heard Prokofiev.
Bill Barclay Yes. And you know what? I think even people who think they know their Prokofiev will forget the dance, the "Dance of the Knights," which everyone will recognize. And that's going to be one of the great moments of the adaptation because that piece is going to come right in. I think everyone's going, oh, you know, Mildred, we know this one. And we won't have remembered that it's from this piece. And that's an important moment in this adaptation because I think that's the piece when the audience will largely fully understand why we've done this. Because that is so famous, the balcony scene is so famous, and it smuggles in all the adjacent other pieces of music that are just as good, and text, but aren't quite as famous to dance with it and form a new whole.
Brian McCreath Your Midsummer Night's Dream with the BSO was such, I just thought, a brilliant, brilliant marriage of that music with that play for something that was sort of like neither one on its own, right? It became its own thing. I felt like at the time that a lot of what you did with that must have come from some experiences that you had as music director of Shakespeare's Globe. And I'm curious because that's such an important part of your background, what did you learn working at Shakespeare's Globe about Shakespeare that you probably couldn't have learned anywhere else?
Bill Barclay It's an acoustic environment and a temple of the ear, the Globe, much like Symphony Hall is, where the aural integrity of the experience is paramount. In Shakespeare's Globe, the text is the music and then the incidental music provides for it, but you sort of have four aural elements. There's text, there's music, there's the audience laughing, and then there's silence. And I like to think of it as like a laundry line with four different clothespins of different colors. And I'm deliberately placing one color after the next. That's what I mean about aural integrity. There's no gaps. It's just these clothespins. And if the audience feels that, they certainly don't see clothespins. They trust that the people who are creating the experience are respecting the journey of their ear through the evening. And the Globe is an acoustic space. It's shaped like a drum. It's got all that wood. It's really a temple of the ear. That's lesson one.
Lesson two is that musicians are characters in Shakespeare's plays. They are not diegetic music in films emotionally coloring something happening. People in Renaissance England didn't even have a psychology of what sound would be like disembodied from a musician. They didn't, you couldn't even imagine it would have been the world of fairies. And so, at The Globe, we costume musicians, we see them almost all the time, often times they'r e memorized, and then there are moments in the play and there are moments in Romeo and Juliet where they talk to the musicians and they speak back to them. These make music more visible. And so in my adaptations, when I go to Symphony Hall after doing things at The Globe, I want the orchestra on stage, I want them in light, I want them corporally, physically involved and invested in the theatrical world, I want everything in the same eye line for the audience because they are characters in this world. And if they're in the pit or submerged and we're up top, that's just not the playing field Shakespeare would have recognized.
Brian McCreath Amazing. That's really fascinating to hear you talk about that. Another part of your background is that apparently you were at BUTI [Boston University Tanglewood Institute] at one point as a young person.
Bill Barclay Yes, it's true. 1997, I think. I was a vocal art student at BUTI. Yeah, my first summer at Tanglewood. I remember it so vividly.
Brian McCreath Tell me about what made it so important to you.
Bill Barclay Oh, gosh. Well, one falls in love with the shire here. And at that very impressionable age, the sort of bucolic wonderland and the fireflies and the hormones and all of those young artists coming into their own. And then being able to come in. I remember I was selected for a project to sing with Seiji Ozawa, and so I got to meet him, work with him, and he was a god to me at the time. There's just so many great, legendary people who were around and to rub up shoulders with, you know, Don Upshaw or Bryn Terfel or Yo-Yo Ma, and they were right there, and they accessible, and they were dressed down, and they were having a great summer. And that, again, it goes back to this sort of egalitarian framework where we're all in it together, and we're equal, and everyone feels approachable. And that's what Tanglewood gives that other places just don't.
Brian McCreath Bill Barclay, it is such a pleasure to talk with you and thank you for these insights into Romeo and Juliet. I'm really, really looking forward to this. Thanks a lot.
Bill Barclay Yeah, thank you.