The youth are f**ked.
Left to their own devices in their parents’ world of violent ends, an impulsive pair of star-crossed lovers hurtle towards their inescapable fate. The intoxicating high of passion quickly descends into a brutal chaos that can only end one way.
Emmy Award winner Kit Connor (“Heartstopper”) and Golden Globe Award winner Rachel Zegler (Spielberg’s “West Side Story”) star as Romeo and Juliet in Tony Award-winning director Sam Gold’s (Fun Home, An Enemy of the People) visceral and visionary production. Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy now belongs to a new generation on the edge.
Marketing is marketing, and it might not have mattered then, but it certainly does now — now being the moment in which you can see all this high-key, try-hard set dressing clogging up Circle in the Square. At the center of the whole trendy, clubby, stuffed-animals-and-inflatable-furniture jumble is, as Cordelia once said to her dad, nothing. One could be forgiven for walking away from this show’s two (and a half) hours’ traffic thinking that maybe Romeo and Juliet is kind of mid after all. Such is the enervating effect of so aggressively clickbaity and uncurious a production.
Once the audience has become accustomed to the playful, cool mood that extends into the chic lobby, they await the, er, tragedy to unfold. On that end, “Romeo + Juliet” is a let-down. During the dark final moments in the crypt, or wherever the heck they are, the play peters out. The best bits are specks in the rearview; the sadness, less powerful than the booming tunes from two hours earlier. Then, in the last seconds, we are told as ever, “For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” And, as the lights fade at Circle in the Square, we’re not so sure about that.
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Broadway Revival Production Broadway |
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