In addition to his role as the music director, Gordon-Johnson will play Benevolio alongside his fellow cast members for “Romeo and Juliet,” which opens ?7:30 p.m. Friday at the Ruth N. Halls Theatre.
“I thought it was a really cool opportunity to do something that I had never done before,” Gordon-Johnson said. “I think it’s some of the coolest choral music that you can do.”
Nancy Lipschultz, IU associate professor and director of the show, said she chose to portray the traditional version as opposed to a modern adaptation of ?the show.
“I think that’s been done and done and done,” Lipschultz said. “Modern dress, contemporary dress and things and recently on Broadway with Orlando Bloom, it was all very modern. I just thought it might be nice just to do a real Elizabethan sort of ?traditional look.”
Lipschultz said she always incorporates live music into all of her productions, and she thought Gordon-Johnson would be a good person to ask to help her coordinate the music because of his musical background and experience in the Jacobs School of ?Music.
“Having that background helped a lot with this because I had some ideas from what I’d already known and sung before, but of course that’s not going to be enough,” Gordon-Johnson said. “But having a familiarity with the other composers and other types of music helped me find other things to work with.”
The music consists of madrigals, motets and anthems from the Elizabethan era. The music sung in Act I is more lively and upbeat to represent the positive tone of Romeo and Juliet falling in love. A madrigal will be sung prior to the play to help set the mood.
“This kind of helps us warm up the audience to the world without just waiting for the ball to drop with two households both alike in dignity in fair Verona where we lay our scene,” Gordon-Johnson said.
Gordon-Johnson said the music in Act II is intended to heighten the drama that is portrayed in the plot.
“There’s a madrigal that Ian Scott and I sing after the Capulets find Juliet’s dead body after she’s drunk the potion before she goes to the tomb,” Gordon-Johnson said. “We come in under Friar Lawrence’s eulogy of Juliet to add something to the scene.”
Gordon-Johnson said casts in traditional musicals block out an entire week to work on music, but because this is a play, they did not have that much time to rehearse the music. With only two Saturday rehearsals to learn the majority of the music, Gordon-Johnson said he felt he underestimated the amount of time it would take to teach all of the complex music to the cast.
“The hardest thing was probably finding the ways to maintain the integrity of the music but also make it accessible for people of all different levels of comfort and experience,” Gordon-Johnson said.
Lipschultz said the audience can expect an electric, exciting young atmosphere where children clash with their parents and parents clash with their children.
Gordon-Johnson said his experience being the music director has given him a whole new level of appreciation for the job that choral conductors and music directors do in terms of learning how to be efficient but kind and work with people who are at different levels.
“There were moments where I was just like, ‘I am so far out of my depth, I have no idea what I’m doing and I hope this is gonna work,’ and they did the work,” Gordon-Johnson said. “It made me appreciate what choral and musical directors do, but at the same time it made me appreciate just how integral every single person is.”
