ROMEO + JULIET ARE DEAD
so is broadway, btw
I spent all this week rusticating through some (kinda sorta) unexpected snow days after ringing in the New Year with back to back trips. Today is my first day back in office since the day before Christmas Eve and it’s been rough. I have a stack of things to catch up on plus about six new tasks that all need to somehow be finished by Monday. I should actually be doing that right now but instead, I can’t stop thinking about last weekend.
I went to New York because I wanted to see a couple Broadway shows. I’m old enough and financially stable enough that a trip to New York to see a show should not qualify as “a treat” or “something that will monetarily devastate me for the next three months” but here we are. The prices for some of these shows? Absolutely ungodly. $500 for orchestra seats at The Outsiders, $200 for front of the Mezzanine at Cabaret. At the height of Stereophonic love earlier last year, I saw a single ticket going for $600 and almost threw my laptop clear across my room. What are we even doing anymore? Have we as a society completely lost the plot? I believe that artists should be paid what they’re worth and I’m willing to spend money on good art, but there has to be some disconnect between the higher powers that be and the general feeling of malaise that permeates Broadway discourse nowadays. It be one thing if the shows were good but… well!
I saw Romeo + Juliet last Friday ($220 for that ticket, money I long to get back), the Gen-Z-ified production that seems specifically catered to fourteen year olds. I’m personally of the opinion that art in general (books, plays, the hyper specific thesis of a doctoral candidate) doesn’t have to be dumbed down to be grasped or understood. I also believe that by attempting to do so, or by adding extra spectacle to a text that isn’t needed, you cheapen the experience for everyone involved. That’s what happened with this one.
I’ve always hated the “they were just dumb kids in love!!!!” framing that Romeo and Juliet often gets. They were young, sure, (Juliet, I believe not quite 14, Romeo a few years older) but they weren’t stupid. Romeo is lovesick and fickle, Juliet bright-eyed and naive, but they’re both sharp and clever and when they meet they fall head over heels in real, unwavering love. How do I know that? Because the text tells me so. To diminish them by boiling them down to mere horny teens renders the entire act of telling the story mute. This is a tragedy not because they were young and dumb, but because they were you and me.
Have you never wanted someone so badly you felt as if you might disappear if they didn’t talk to you? Have you never loved so hard that when you lost it you thought you would die? Romeo and Juliet is high drama, of course, but it isn’t fantasy. I have heard (and uttered, I won’t lie) “I’m going to kill myself” too often in the midst of heartache to act as if Juliet stabbing herself at the end of the play isn’t at least a little relatable.
All this to say, all the extra shit— that pulsing bass, the flashing lights, the truly atrocious valley girl accent put on by Tommy Dorfman while playing the Nurse— aren’t necessary. I don’t need random songs by Jack Antonoff and Romeo downing his poison with a borg for Shakespeare to feel relevant. So many truly bizarre choices were made in this production that it overshadowed the highlights. I thought the staging of the balcony scene was quite good and that pull-up Romeo does to kiss Juliet? A perfect modern touch that gives a hint at how good the show might have been in more trustworthy hands. And whenever Sonya Tayeh’s choreography didn’t lean too heavily into the “everything is cool and hot and young!!!” brief production clearly received, it produced some really effective stage imagery.
But god, the show was such a heavily ironic drag. Gabby Beans as Mercutio killed all the momentum of her clear talent by putting on a dude bro shtick that turned all of Mercutio’s funny wordplay into mincemeat on her tongue. The Montague and the Capulet gangs suffered both from design choices that did absolutely nothing to differentiate them and a lack of direction that had them all talking and walking and shuffling about the exact same way. For all the posturing about youth and vitality in the excessive advertising, there was no muscle, no fierceness, no delicious feeling of heady danger as the cast circled aimlessly around each other.
I think Romeo and Juliet is hard to pull off for this very reason. It’s a tale as old as time, a dynamic worked and reworked again and again in adaptations so big they have their own infamy. Creatives get so caught up in the idea of how a show about young kids falling in love and killing each other should make you feel that they forget so much of that work has already been done for them. The language here is already so raw and rich— you don’t so much need to add on as you need to translate. What makes this story relevant to the current moment? What change in cast or setting or time can bring forth something new and unexpected?
Hadestown, the other show I saw last weekend, answers this question of translation beautifully. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is even older than Romeo and his lover, but the musical makes it feel so fresh that despite knowing how it ends, I still gasped in surprise when Orpheus turned to look. In Hadestown, the underworld becomes an industrial wasteland, a walled city that promises protection and material sufficiency in exchange for back breaking labor and isolation. Here, Orpheus is the kind and naive musician bent on writing a song that changes the world. Eurydice, a hardened outsider who knows a lot more about how the world works, falls in love with him despite herself. But that love isn’t enough to keep her warm come wintertime, and when Hades comes knocking, she slips down into the abyss, forcing Orpheus to chase after her.
It’s not a completely fair comparasion. Hadestown is a loose adaptation, a new work created in the myth’s image. Romeo + Juliet is more of an aborted attempt at creation, using Shakespeare’s text while rendering the intented story almost unrecognizable with all the bells and whistles it foists on it.
Honestly, it probably would have benefitted from stepping out on its own. Maybe without having to use someone else’s words, the show might have found something real to say.
I really hope I didn’t come across as a Shakespeare purist, oh god.
xx,
april
The Yearner in Chief has spoken!