It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly 30 years since Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet set Shakespeare’s play to a driving pop-rock score, updated the story with TV news bulletins and “Sword”-branded pistols, and helped turn a pre-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio into a movie star. That hyperkinetic film, with all its MTV-style quick cuts and youthful Gen X stars, now seems like a relic of its late ’90s timeframe.
But every generation deserves its own version of the Bard’s star-crossed lovers, and now the Alphas have theirs, though it looks an awful lot like a messily watered down version of Luhrmann’s, with dashes of Spring Awakening tossed in for good measure (The new show’s tagline, “The youth are f**ked,” is a gloss on Awakening‘s signature song, “Totally Fucked”). Director Sam Gold even adopts the plus sign for the title of his barebones version of Romeo + Juliet, which opened Thursday at Broadway’s Circle in the Square in a production that wears its many, many influences heavily on its bedazzled club-ready shoulders except perhaps for the one that matters most: Shakespeare’s original play.
Let me say that I don’t have a problem with reinterpreting a classic, of distilling the essence of a centuries-old story for new audiences. It’s fine to set the play at a modern-day rave, stylishly designed by the collective dots and sensationally lit by Isabella Byrd, with pulsing dance-rock music playing. In such a setting, it makes sense that the dueling Montague and Capulet crews would smoke and vape and occasionally engage in same-sex smooches while wearing Japanese-inflected street fashion, with baggy pants and cute stuffed teddy-bear backpacks (costumes by Enver Chakartash). Perhaps Romeo does become more relatable if he mixes his poison in a BORG jug like any other frat dude. And you want to jettison multiple scenes and make your tight 10-member cast double and even triple up their roles? All good. One of the reasons that Shakespeare’s works have endured is that they can sustain, and withstand, multiple interpretations and devices.
But here it’s all done so clumsily that the story becomes a muddle even for those familiar with the plot. I guess the talented Tommy Dorfman (Thirteen Reasons Why) reads as slightly more butch as the pugnacious Tybalt than as Juliet’s Nurse, but it’s hard to tell the two apart from scene to scene. At some point you’ll just give up guessing whether the wonderful Sola Fadiran is playing Capulet or Lady Capulet. (Both wear top coats that flow down to their ankles.) Poor Gabby Beans, a remarkable actress saddled with playing Romeo’s bestie Mercutio and two others, at one point declares, “I’m the Friar now” in a vain attempt to tamp down narrative chaos. It doesn’t really work.
Luckily, Gold has scored in casting his Romeo: Kit Connor, the 20-year-old star of the Netflix series Heartstopper, is a magnetic figure on stage, projecting all the eagerness, callowness, and laddishness of a charismatic young man at a larval stage of becoming. With his plump, round cheeks, wide-eyed gaze, and gym-buff rugby-player’s body crowbarred into a tight black mesh tank top, he’s the first Romeo I’ve seen since DiCaprio who convincingly registers as a teenager — one quick to forget his pining for a past love named Rosaline and fall headlong into single-minded pursuit of a nearly-of-age girl he’s only just met. (In his heavy-handed edit of the script, Gold has oddly retained the references to Juliet as a girl just shy of 14 — with peers “younger than you here in Verona, ladies of esteem, are made already mothers.” The play, and this production, are silent on Romeo’s actual age.) Connor also has a preternatural grasp of the rhythms and poetry of his lines, imbuing them with a lived-in naturalism that actors twice his age have struggled to achieve. You sense innately how this Romeo could both mix it up with the guys and his fellow kinsmen, but also resist peer pressure to go his own way when it comes to chasing a forbidden love.
Rachel Zegler, who at 23 has developed a huge fan base as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s 2021 West Side Story remake and last year’s Hunger Games prequel, is in many ways well-matched with Connor as Juliet. They have a palpable chemistry together, particularly in the balcony scene that Gold ingeniously stages with Juliet cooing from an elevated bunk bed that makes use of all of the compressed vertical space in the Circle in the Square theater. It helps that Connor gets to flex his biceps doing a pull-up to bring his face closer for a memorable smooch that elicits both awwws and awe from the audience. While Zegler makes some admirable attempts to inject some ‘tude into her lines, you keep sensing that the language is like a recent find from a vintage shop that she hasn’t yet found a way to adapt to her personal style and truly make her own.
Zegler also gets a chance to display her remarkable singing voice, picking up a handheld mic at the end of the first act to deliver a pop ballad (one of several original tunes by Jack Antonoff) that is perfectly pleasant, and pleasantly sung. But like many of Gold’s directorial flourishes, the song serves no discernible function either for the plot or to reveal more about her character. It’s also oddly placed, coming not after the balcony scene where you’d expect Juliet to want to process her feelings about this dreamboat who’s linked up with her family’s bitter rivals, but after the slaying of her cousin Tybalt that her character doesn’t learn about until after intermission.
Gold and his creative team produce some stunning tableaux on the cramped stage, and the fight scenes are athletic enough that you fear that players may end up in the laps of first-row theatergoers. But Gold himself is in his mid-40s and a lot of his attempts to youthify the material fall flat. In the hurried second act, just after the Capulets learn of the “death” of Juliet (though she is merely in a chemically induced sleep state), Gold shoehorns in a forgettable comic-relief scene featuring a Capulet servant (Gían Pérez, who also plays Samson and Paris) and a musician. The moment serves no purpose except to play a snippet of Antonoff’s fun. song “We Are Young,” to allow Pérez to drop an F-bomb, and to give music director/DJ Sarah Goldstone a single line that resonates more deeply than I suspect Gold intended: “Tis not an appropriate time to play music.” (Unless you know Shakespeare’s script, it’s not even clear that Pérez is playing a servant and not Paris, the deep-pocketed Juliet suitor whom the Capulets prefer.)
What’s more problematic is that Gold doesn’t appear to have any unifying approach to the play aside from creating moments that might play well on TikTok or Instagram Reels. Perhaps that is the point. Even watered-down Shakespeare can serve a purpose; Roger Ebert called Luhrmann’s film a “mess” and a “very bad idea” but it managed to find a devoted fan base despite its frenetic excesses. We can only hope that Connor’s luminous performance will be enough to spark the interest of teens and twentysomethings in other classic dramas. With luck, these production might even tilt more towards acts of pondering than pandering. I suspect his fans would follow him to even darker, more serious places — and I’d love to see him don some inky cloaks as Hamlet. Perchance to dream.
ROMEO + JULIET
Circle in the Square, Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes (1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through Feb. 16, 2024
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