No happy end for Romeo and Juliet

On normal school days, mornings don't work at our house unless the radio is on. Without the familiar rhythm of alternating news headlines and music, we all go into a sleepy daze and forget to keep moving. On good days, the music program after the headlines at 6:30 plays Tchaikovsky when Christopher finally comes out of the shower, and Christopher comes to life and becomes happy and relatively alert. No one knows why Tchaiskovsky has this effect on Christopher, but it always works. Bach, Hayden, Chopin and Beethoven are also good omens first thing in the morning, but Tchaikovsky definitely works best for Christopher.

One morning a few weeks ago, the composer of the morning was Prokofiev – and Patrick was suddenly positively electrified. For several days, Prokofiev was all he listened to. Permanently. He even managed to find the old "Peter and the Wolf" CD that the boys listened to when they were little and listened attentively and intensely to that again. Patrick hears a strong similarity between Prokofiev and Danny Elfman, his favorite film music composer, and he even discovered on the Internet that Prokofiev died only shortly before Danny Elfman was born, which might be regarded by some as a significant coincidence. When Peter remembered that the local state theater is currently running a production of Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" ballet, obviously we all had to go to the theater to see it.

We had gone to see a very modern, slightly abbreviated but very intense version of Romeo and Juliet a few months ago at a small theater. As much as we were all caught up in it, when it was over and the lights came on, the first words out of Patrick's mouth were, "Why can't somebody do a version of Romeo and Juliet with a happy end?"

The production last night was beautiful. Despite the ugliness of this theater and our less than satisfactory seats, we all enjoyed the stage set, the lighting, the costumes, the dancing – and most of all the music. Then at the end, when Juliet wakes up in the crypt in this version, there is a brief moment of happiness before the poison Romeo has just swallowed takes effect. Suddenly I heard Patrick whisper next to me, "Maybe the ballet version has a happy end." It wasn't really even wishful thinking, since he naturally knew perfectly well how the story ends.

The same story has been told over and over and over again in countless variations for over four hundred years, and every time the story is told, people like Patrick start hoping against all odds that just this once it might all work out well. But it never does. There is still no happy end in sight for Romeo and Juliet.