Word: romeo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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STRATFORD, Conn.--In all literature there exists no more famous, more popular or more influential a love story than Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. And if one extends the field to music, only Wagner's Tristan and Isolde can rival...
...those two short consecutive scenes that inflict the words "banished" and "banishment" on us no less than 26 times. Not even General St. Pe's repeated references to his "seventeen years" of marriage in Waltz of the Toreadors can come close to the numbing annoyance of this portion of Romeo...
...stage history of Romeo and Juliet is unusually curious. For a time the ending was changed to keep Romeo and Juliet happily alive (for a century and a half King Lear was performed with a similar happy ending). Then for 165 years Juliet was made to revive before Romeo's death, to permit the two a teary dialogue of farewell...
...Elizabethan period the role of Juliet was played by a young boy, Mary Saunderson in 1662 being the first woman to assume the part. But in the 19th century the original practice was stood on its head, and there was quite a vogue of giving the role of Romeo to such women as Lydia Kelly, Priscilla Horton, Ellen Tree, Mrs. H.B. Conway, and Charlotte Cushman (playing opposite her sister's Juliet until she herself switched to the female part). One year George Rignold was advertised to give a performance of Romeo with seven different Juliets, but the promise fell...
...chief curiosity in the current Stratford version is director Michael Kahn's decision to relocate the play in 1866. Personally I'd prefer a Rinascimento Romeo to a Risorgimento one. But first love, youthful rambunctiousness and the generation gap (a favorite theme with Shakespeare, as witness Lear, Cymbeline, Othello, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest among others) are universal, and Kahn's choice is perfectly defensible. Shakespeare specified a Verona summer. In 1866, Verona, the episcopal see of the Venetia region abutting Austria, was a hotbed of turmoil, a pawn in the seven-week Austro-Prussian War, during which...