Theatre in Review: Romeo + Juliet (Circle in the Square)

	Kit Connor and cast. Photo: Matthew Murphy + Evan Zimmerman

This Romeo + Juliet doesn't come alive until the bodies start dropping. It happens near the end of the first half, with the murder of Mercutio, a moment that finally injects some electricity into Sam Gold's wayward production. The director makes sure Romeo, stunned at his beloved cousin's slaughter during an out-of-control street brawl, takes a good long moment to process the shock before taking deliberate vengeance on Tybalt, Mercutio's killer. It's a startling choice and a canny one: Romeo's revenge is often presented as a flash of fury, a reflex action he instantly regrets. Here, he thinks about it, giving into homicidal rage only after an agonizing pause. Some of the violence staged earlier in the evening by Drew Leary looks fake and overly choreographed; in this case, the bloodshed feels real and so do the ugly emotions driving it. It effectively raises the stakes to the life-or-death level, plausibly setting into motion the events that lead to the double suicide at the finale.

It also doesn't happen a moment too soon because, up to this point, Gold's staging struggles to achieve a clear and meaningful identity beyond his initial gimmick, which threatens to turn William Shakespeare's romantic tragedy into the stage version of young adult fiction. Reversing the practice of casting actors long past adolescence in the title roles, Gold has opted for the twenty-year-old Kit Connor and twenty-three-year-old Rachel Zegler (both of whom look younger than their ages), surrounding them with evidence of today's rave culture: a DJ, a giant stuffed bear, a shopping cart filled with plush toys, and a stage deck that opens up to reveal a teeming, colorful flower garden. He has engaged pop music maven Jack Antonoff to provide EDM-flavored underscoring and Sonya Tayeh to supervise the dance sequences. Think of it as Electric Daisy Shakespeare.

These touches might provide a fresh vision of the play -- or, at worst, they might not matter -- if the cast were, collectively, more at ease with verse drama. A major exception is Connor, whose Romeo, first seen cradling in the arms of that giant bear, is a lively and original creation. A fool for love -- his theatrical whinging over his lost love Rosaline is amusingly persuasive -- he is genuinely undone by his immediate infatuation with Juliet, recklessly pursuing her with single-minded zeal. When, later, everything goes wrong, his heartbreak is palpable, cueing his stunned reaction to news of his banishment, a virtual assault on Friar Lawrence (his one true ally), and a thwarted attempt at killing himself. Connor's handling of Romeo's speeches in the tomb scene, when he mourns what he believes is Juliet's corpse, vibrates with an intensity that culminates in profound despair; we see a bright young light being effectively snuffed out. (I haven't seen Heartstopper, the series that made him a star, but I suddenly as a sense of its appeal.) If the rest of the cast were on his level, this would be a Romeo and Juliet to remember.

As it happens, Connor often seems to be working solo thanks to Zegler's oddly uncommitted Juliet. (At a young age, she is already getting typecast, having taken the Juliet role in the recent film West Side Story.) She doesn't lack intelligence, particularly when evading her mother's questions about marrying, discreetly saying, "It is an honor that I dream not of." Most of the time, however, looking wide-eyed and speaking her lines with a deliberation that rarely betrays strong emotion, she moves through the tragic narrative without seeming to get caught up in it. She never matches Conner's passion, and, in other scenes, one wonders why Juliet isn't more afraid, expectant, angry -- or in love. Displaying her impressive belt in an interpolated musical number that closes the first half, her performance suddenly takes on additional colors but, most of the time, I'm afraid this Romeo and Juliet is a largely one-sided affair.

Aside from Nihar Duvvuri, a solid Balthazar, the rest of the ten-person cast doubles and triples in various roles, often without regard to gender. Sola Fadiran is both Lord and Lady Capulet and, in truth, it's not always clear which parent is which. But his command of the verse is superior and, whenever he appears, the action suddenly acquires lucidity and force; a high point of the second half is Lord Capulet's angry denunciation of his rebellious daughter, demanding that she arrive at the designated time and place for her arranged marriage to Paris. The rest of the cast struggles with iambic pentameter, fighting its rhythm and delivering choppy line readings that too often lose the sense of the words. Among them, Gabby Beans is reasonably effective as Mercutio and Friar Lawrence without doing full justice to either role. Tommy Dorfman badly fumbles the Nurse's bawdy jokes but gives Tybalt a genuinely menacing edge.

Especially in the first half, Gold's direction is so focused on his concept that the actors are left to fend for themselves (The second half, when events overtake the characters, driving them to disaster, plays much more strongly.) There are all sorts of coy, attention-getting touches -- two guys pausing in the middle of a street battle for a passionate kiss; Romeo lying down on an inflatable plastic couch, like a psychotherapy patient, to confess his romantic angst; Paris, looking scruffy and unappealing, sporting a T-shirt that proclaims him a "gift from God" -- all of which amount to so many silly one-off gags. As is often the case in his handling of classic works, Gold gets so caught in such details that a larger sense of the play is lost.

The design team supplies the club atmosphere on which the production depends. The scenic collective dots supplies all the elements mentioned above but, having also designed An Enemy of the People last season, they have yet to realize that in this space, less is more; that giant flower bed is an especially gratuitous touch. Isabella Byrd's strongly directional lighting creates an impressive chiaroscuro atmosphere, carving one striking tableau after another; the cruciform arrangement of lighting units behind the DJ is a striking touch, as are the bold saturated color washes and use of strobe effects during the murder of Mercutio. It is not critical to say that Enver Chakartash's costumes are startingly ugly; they are merely faithful to their milieu. Still, the designer might have done more to help the actors distinguish their varied roles. Cody Spencer's sound design ensures that Antonoff's score is slickly delivered but, overall, the music adds little to the production aside from an occasional throbbing bass line.

Such thoughts may not matter because Connor and Zegler are packing them in, putting Romeo + Juliet into the upper tier of Broadway hits. But this is the latest in a series of Gold-directed productions that pair boldfaced names with underbaked, sometimes perverse, concepts for standard classic works. A fine director of contemporary plays -- especially those by Annie Baker -- he has mastered the technique of glittery, flash-in-the-pan successes that generate plenty of buzz no matter the result. It's a smart career move but possibly not the best use of his talents. --David Barbour