Romeo & Juliet

Last night we saw R&J at Pioneer Theatre. I would give it a B grade. As you may know, this is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays and I'm rather picky about the players. Juliet was quite shrill and over dramatic and the Nurse was completely overcooked (even though she plays a comic character.) Romeo did a fine job. I give all the actors praise though because they memorized and delivered three HOURS of continuous dialogue in Shakespeare without a hitch- no small task. The set was amazing and the costumes authentic.

I liked these notes from the director: One need search no further than daily news headlines to find palpable evidence that Shakespeare's story lives on. Long-standing feuds whose root causes pre-date memory continue to sever families, countries, cultures, classes, races; bloodshed erupts, young people die, lessons are sometimes learned. It is, in part, because we do not embrace these lessons that we are compelled to re-tell this story, it is also because Romeo and Juliet is a ravishing feast for the ears and for the eyes, that its symmetrical structure gives us a perfect balance of comedy and tragedy, and that the traffic on the stage is peopled with some of the most memorable and compelling characters Shakespeare created.