Word: mab
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That would be a mistake in any play of Shakespeare's, but Romeo and Juliet suffers cruelly. Shakespeare frolics in the verbal exuberance of his youth in each of the play's celebrated passages. Like Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech, Romeo and Juliet studies insubstantiality, considering love as the product of words, not acts. After all, there isn't much in the plot to convince an audience of the worth of the love between Romeo and Juliet: a kiss at a masked ball, a nighttime encounter, a secret marriage, and one night together are its only substance...
Jonathan Prince's Mercutio is equally smooth but much less ingenuous. Prince pays attention to what he says, but should learn that the moment of stillness is as valuable to an actor as the gesture. He accompanies each line in the "Queen Mab" speech with a fidget, wave, or wriggle of the hips and ends up irritating instead of captivating. Alexander C. Pearson gives Friar Laurence a good, hammy performance, suitably gawkish, well-intentioned and incompetent, but by the end he gets sucked into the general failure...
Schubert, Symphony No. 9 in C; Debussy, Ibéria and La Mer; Berlioz, Queen Mab Scherzo; Respighi, Feste Romane; Mendelssohn, A Midsummer Night's Dream; Strauss, Death and Transfiguration; Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique): The Philadelphia Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini conducting (5 LPs, RCA). When Toscanini made these recordings in 1941-42 with the orchestra Leopold Stokowski had built, it was astonishing, then as now, to note how readily the musicians yielded their lush sound and fat phrasing to the brilliant, transparent, sharply contoured style that Toscanini favored. The resulting interpretations are still splendid to hear-spacious...
...right for him to be half-sighted, with a black patch over one eye. But he must not talk at half speed; after all, he "will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month." Yet Rounds delivers his delicate and dazzling "Queen Mab" aria in a leaden manner, with lots of pauses. Vivace has become andante. I've said before--and I repeat--that the best guide here is the Queen Mab vocal scherzetto and orchestral scherzo from Berlioz's symphony. Furthermore, for a man who revels so in words, Mercutio should know that "lamentable...
...prize of the day went to the Queen Mab, an imitation of a paddle-wheel river boat. Ward awarded four cases of beer to the craft, citing it as "the most extravagant, colossal and stupendous raft and the most likely to be hit by low flying aircraft...