Romeo and Juliet
behind the screen
Our first show, R&J, will be on Zoom this year due to covid-19, so our tech work might not be as obvious in the final production. But we want to make sure that everyone's hard work shines through, so we made a behind the scenes page to show off our processes! The audience doesn't normally get to see this side of the production so we're excited to let you all in on our secrets!!
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set lights costumes props sound
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Set Concepts
By: Natalia Vasquez and Stephen Thomas
The picture to the left shows a lighting plot that we would have used if we had this on a live stage. We made this from inspiration from the production photos found from past Romeo and Juliet productions. This plot is based on the photos we found. The key for the types on instruments on the plot are shown in the bottom left corner. All the instruments also have a color on them. Those would be the colored gels we would use to make color washes on stage. For Out of the 14 Source 4's, five of them are the gel color Dark Bastard Amber (R03). All the other source 4's have the gel color No color blue (R60). The PAR source 4's are in the gel color Pale Lavender (R53). The last gel color used for this lighting plot is Pale Yellow Green (R87) which will provide a slight green wash to the stage making a unsettling out of this world feeling through the green color. The two Source 4's that are in the third electric are two GoBo's which will provide texture to the stage and make it feel like they are in certain environments.
Lighting Concepts
By: Cassidy Stanley and Carson Murray
Props Concepts
Prop Concepts
By: Caitlin Schranz and Vanessa Darko
Costume Concepts
By: Kyla Crowell and Bree Cullins
Sound Concepts
By: Sydney Shell and Jake Curl
Sound in that time period
Normally, one boy actor could sing and perhaps play an instrument. Adult actors, especially those specializing in clown roles, sang as well.
To what sorts of characters did Shakespeare assign most of the singing? Servants (both children and adults), clowns, fools, rogues, and minor personalities. Major figures never sing, except when in disguise or in distracted mental states. Most songs, in fact, are addressed to the protagonists themselves.
Textual evidence points to the availability of two string players who were competent at the violin, viol, and lute. A few plays, notably Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Cymbeline, indicate specific consorts (ensembles) of instruments.
A favourite device of the playwright was to turn the lyrics of a popular song into a bantering dialogue between characters. A classic instance of this technique is the scene between the clown Peter and the household musicians in Romeo and Juliet (Act IV, scene 5). Peter first begs them to play “Heart’s ease” and “My heart is full of woe,” both well-loved popular tunes. Then Peter challenges the musicians Simon Catling, Hugh Rebeck, and James Soundpost to an interpretive debate over a fusty old lyric from The Garden of Dainty Devices (1576).
The complexity of such music was perhaps inappropriate to outdoor theatrical performance and above the heads of most of Shakespeare’s audience. Extant Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre music is simple and vivid, almost Baroque in style.
http://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/elizabethan-music.htm
Music had been used to accompany poems during the medieval era. The Elizabethans taste for the Theatre was soon enhanced by the accompaniment of music. It was only a short step to combine the accustomed music with its accompanying verse with the exciting pageantry of the Elizabethan theatre.
The different types of music were Elizabethan Church music, court music, street music, theatre music, and town music
https://www.classical-music.com/features/works/classical-music-inspired-shakespeare/
This tragic love story has inspired some truly great music, along with its share of less successful pieces. One of the earliest settings is a singspiel by the Czech composer Georg Benda, whose 1776 Romeo und Julie, loosely based on the play, was one of his most popular pieces. In keeping with operatic tradition at the time, his version ends happily, and he isn’t the only composer to experiment with the plot.
https://music.allpurposeguru.com/2015/10/music-inspired-by-romeo-and-juliet/
The modernization of shakespeare
On these websites listed below, you will be able to find an assortment of ways that productions of Shakespeare plays have changed, and adapted into our world today
http://www.mediafactory.org.au/2015-media1-projects-onestepfurther/2015/05/30/romeo-and-juliet/
https://sites.google.com/site/shakespeareandpopularmusic/shakespeare-and-the-screen
In Conclusion,
The Shakespearean times were home to some of the most melodically brilliant pieces of music. Because of today’s technology and skill, we are able to combine the brilliant melodies of renaissance pieces with the edge and spunk of music today.