Radiohead and Juliet

I went to a play this evening at the Lewis and Clark theater department, which was a modern interpretation set on the LC campus of the classic Shakespeare play. The soundtrack, besides an excellent live performance by some music students, was more or less entirely comprised of Radiohead songs. They filtered in and out, starting in the middle of songs and ending after 30 or so seconds generally; it was clear that they were carefully picked for their lyrical value as well as their contribution to the mood of the play.

I think that the use of Radiohead's music turned what starts out as a really happy story, and only later morphs into a tragedy, into a morose, doomed warning against falling in love at the wrong time. The melancholic singing of Thom Yorke foreshadowed the disastrous turn the story would take at the beginning of the story. This was not detrimental to the story at all; there aren't going to be many people that go into a performance of Romeo and Juliet expecting a happy ending, of course.

Just as the music turned the beginning of the play into a melancholic, fate-ridden back story, it adjusted the ending from the tragic, heartbreaking moment of dread that it normally is, into a detached series of events which highlighted the aloneness of each of the characters in their final moments. Fittingly for a time when personal contact has become more and more scarce, and the distance between people means that deaths are heard about through phone calls more often than not, the music and staging portrayed a community that had lost control of a situation, and was left to contemplate the thoughts, alone.

Music I've been listening to today:

George Friedrick Handel: Giulio Cesare

Claude Debussy: Preludes, Book 2