Driftwood's Review: Romeo & Juliet

Otis P. Driftwood here, reviewing the local Arts - or what's left of them. She-who-must-be-obeyed and I attended the American Ballet Theater production of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, Jillian Murphy dancing the lead.
She-who-etc. loves Ms. Murphy with what borders on an unwholesome motherish doting, and she was pleased beyond measure. Yours truly viewed it in a different light, loving Ms. Murphy - who, if the truth be told - is the paradigm of some sort of Elfen Rivendellian beauty from the imagination of J.R.R. Tolkien; a beauty not quite of this earth, deigning to give us a view of eternity, and scampering off to Grey Havens after only 3 hours, leaving us and never returning....................................literally! For the corporate sponsors are drying up.

We find the Arts imperiled. American Ballet Theater may never come back. Didn't some Know-Nothings and Nativists and KKK gut the Stimulus Package of Arts monies? I vaguely remember something to that effect. I can't think of anything more sad than proceeding to one's seat, looking at the nameplate affixed to it, attesting that Mr. and Mrs. X had donated a sum of money for the refurbishment of this very seat; only now everything was becoming a little tarnished, a little threadbare, or it threatens to do so in the very near future. Just what I always wanted: a testimonial to my munificence posted in a gilded relic of the golden past which is falling down around our ears !!!!!!!

BUT, I digress.
Prokofiev's music always leaves me wanting more of someone else's. It's bad enough that the seats are designed for a bygone crowd of less gargantuan proportions than we, and I must twist and turn uncomfortably trying to find a balance between pain and acute discomfort. The Capulet Masked Ball sequence features a piece of music which can only be described as lugubrious...almost dirge-like. The Funeral March from Saul would be a Irish Jig in comparison. However, in all fairness, we decided that this was what passed for gaiety in Stalinesque Russia at the time of Prokofiev's youth in 1935 or '36. The orchestra was quite adequate.
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