The first major set of music cues in Romeo & Juliet is during the big fight at the end of ActI/Scene1. This is where the Montagues and the Capulets call each other out with famous lines like “Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?” and ends with a physical confrontation. During the actual gang fight I imagined a sort of West Side Story fight choreography but with music of the 1920s. I created five short music cues that I thought would work.

The general idea was ok but the director and I agreed that the intensity wasn’t there yet. I then tried adding some high horn parts to three of the cues.

I REALLY loved these! These create the tension and intensity we wanted, but the director, my good friend Steve Dooner, felt strongly that they sounded too modern. He and I have developed a sort of short-hand to describe ideas. He thought they sounded too much like “Doc Severinsen’s Tonight Show band with Ed Shaughnessy on drums”. And he was absolutely right. I got too wrapped up in creating cool licks and lost track of the big picture. This is why I love the collaboration mindset of theater. But it was still fun creating that music and there’s no reason I don’t get to share that work here.

Oh and if you’re wondering… we ultimately ended up using a nice, simple descending bass line as the underscore for that fight scene. And it worked beautifully. But the process (at least for me) required the creation of quite a bit a music to discover what was really right for the scene.