How to go
What: "Romeo, Juliet and Prokofiev"
Where: Schuster Center, Second and Main streets, Dayton
When: 8 p.m. Thursday and Saturday, Oct. 13 and 15
Tickets: $9 to $59
More Info: (888) 228-3630 or www.daytonphilharmonic.com
Radio: WDPR 88.1 and WDPG 89.9 FM will broadcast the program at 10 a.m. Oct. 29 on "Live and Local"
Related: Gittleman will host "Prokofiev Meets Shakespeare," a Classical Connections Series presentation about the composer and his music, at 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 14, at the Schuster. Cromer will be featured and the orchestra will perform the entire work. Tickets are $9 to $39.
DAYTON — Neal Gittleman says he would gladly sit and listen “if Bruce Cromer just read the phone book.”
Bruce Cromer says it’s “the most amazing feeling” to be performing with an entire orchestra behind you.
Put the two together, along the dual masterpieces of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” and Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” orchestral suite and you will have the next concert in the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra’s Miami Valley & Good Samaritan Hospitals Classical Series, Thursday and Saturday, Oct. 13 and 15 at the Schuster Performing Arts Center.
The orchestra, under music director Gittleman’s baton, will perform Prokofiev’s music.
Cromer, resident actor with The Human Race Theatre Company and associate professor of theater at Wright State University, will perform selected scenes from the play.
He will provide narration for some of the passages and play all of the characters in selected scenes, including Romeo, Juliet, the Prince of Verona, Mercutio, Tybalt, Juliet’s Nurse and others.
The brimming program also will include Sierra’s “Alegria” and Schubert’s “Symphony No. 8” (“The Unfinished Symphony”).
The one-man show plus orchestral collaboration (or “Shakespeare-Prokofiev mashup,” in Gittleman’s words) grew out of an educational series for high school students. “That was so good, we decided to expand it,” the DPO maestro said.
“Seeing and hearing this, it’s hard to believe the words and music weren’t designed to go together.”
Prokiofiev’s vivid score was created to accompany a ballet telling of the story.
Shakespeare has been a through line for Cromer’s stage career. As a young theater graduate of WSU, he joined the Alabama Shakespeare Festival company, played many roles and added another specialty as a certified fight choreographer. He has acted in or directed more than half of the Bard’s plays.
In fashioning this performance, Cromer said he and Gittleman listened to the music and “shared our impressions of which sections seemed to be perfect for underscoring text. Other parts of the Prokofiev deserve to be set up by the characters’ lines, then heard alone, with the orchestra ‘painting’ the setting, action and emotion in the audience’s imagination.”
He first planned to read six selected scenes from a podium, “but Neal coaxed me into staging the cuttings,” said Cromer, who has done several one-person shows previously, including the award-winning play “I Am My Own Wife” for The Human Race Theatre.
Some of the scenes include up to three characters interacting.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2377 or tmorris @DaytonDailyNews.com
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