Romeo and Juliet, a ballet by Mark Morris, set to a newly discovered first draft of the score by Prokofiev at the Bard Summerscape Festival. The trip to Bard is 2 1/2 hours from Princeton. It wasn't a nice day but traffic was light and we arrived early, about 12pm for a performance at 2pm. This was our first time to the Summerscape Festival which is a fairly edgy one as Summer music festivals go. The theater is a gem, a beautiful Frank Gehry auditorium with superb acoustics. It was sold out for this was the second of a handful of performances of Mark Morris's new setting of Romeo and Juliet to a newly discovered first version of the great score by Serge Prokofiev. This is the first full length ballet we've seen from Morris, and it is a near masterwork. There are so many unforgettable moments not the least of which is the "happy" ending in which Romeo and Juliet spin away into a galaxy of bright stars. I can't wait to see it again when it comes to New York. Will Morris make some changes? With a little tweaking it will stand up to any version ever choreographed including the classic Kenneth Macmillan version. The score is breathtakingly beautiful, perhaps even finer than the more familiar and heavier version that has come to be one of the best loved ballet scores in the world and it was well conducted by Leon Botstein and finely played by his American Symphony Orchestra. We saw the same cast as on opening night. The dancers were brilliant particularly the lovely Juliet, Rita Donahue, the ardent Romeo David Leventhal, the energetic Nurse Lauren Grant and the two feuding cousins Tybalt played marvelously by Julie Worden and Mercutio effervescently danced by Amber Darragh who practically steals the performance. We were less impressed by the lack of warmth and hospitality at the Bard Summerscape Festival. The audience was elderly, and incredibly aggressive and rude. They sniped at the young Bard students who were handling food and working in the auditorium making it very unpleasant even when the lights were out for the performance (loud annoying conversations as the music was playing). It would take another event of this magnitude to bring us back to the Bard Summerscape Festival. We give the Festival itself a C+, but Romeo and Juliet merits an A.