Friday night, I say a performance of Shakespeare’s classic romantic tragedy, “Romeo & Juliet”, at Edgerton Park in New Haven, performed by the Elm Shakespeare Company. The story of the two underage lovers from Verona’s feuding families who would rather die than live apart has been read, performed, and analyzed for centuries, as well as being constantly referenced and parodied in pop culture, to the point where it has become the quintessential tragic love story. One of the most important aspects of adapting this play in modern times is making the romance at its core believable for an audience who has been exposed to this story’s influences and may see Romeo and Juliet’s love as cliche and a lustful crush rather than true love. In this respect, as well as many others, I feel that Elm Shakespeare company’s adaption definitely succeeded.
The two leads have very strong performances. Steven Lee Johnson played up the goofier side of Romeo, while Courtney Jameson gave my favorite performance in the show as a less passive Juliet. Most importantly, the chemistry between the two of them was very strong, especially as their secret relationship developed over the course of the show. Despite knowing how their story was going to end, I found myself rooting for them due to the sincerity of their love for each other as the actors portrayed. The others actors, on the whole, also gave great performances, in particular Juliet’s nurse, played by Gracy Brown, and Romeo’s friend Mercutio, played by James Udom. However, there were two performances I disliked. Firstly, I disliked that the woman who played Juliet’s cousin Tybalt, who was a substitute and is thus unfortunately mot listed in the program, yelled nearly every one of her lines. While Tybalt was clearly a wrathful character, the constant screaming became monotone and felt out of place at points. Less significantly, I found that Andrew Borthwick-Leslie’s performance as Romeo’s father Lord Montague in his first scene was sub-par, with the way he said his lines coming off as awkward. Fortunately, he was better in the final scene.
Part of what may have made Lord Montague’s lines sound strange in the first scene was the dialogue itself. It took me a little while to get used to Shakespeare’s wordy dialogue being spoken. This was made easier by the younger actors reading the lines in a more modern tone, as it made me able to tell what the line was trying to get across without fully understanding the language being used. One example of this is when Juliet said her famous line, “Romeo, Romeo, where art thou Romeo?” Rather than saying it in a longing tone, Courtney Jameson performed it as a moment of frustration, which even got a chuckle from the audience. The play was also somewhat modernized by the modern clothing the younger characters wore, the best example being Romeo’s outfit. He made his entrance in a red T-shirt, camo pants, and sneakers; and for his wedding, Romeo only bothered to put on a slightly fancier plaid shirt. I liked how this created a divide between the older generation, who were stubborn in their hatred for each other, and the younger generation, who, at least in Romeo and Juliet’s case, were able to look beyond their surnames.
There was one modernization the play made which brought it down for me, however, and that is the use of pop songs as transitions. Other than the very first and last songs used, I found it distracting, especially when it was a song I recognized. For example, after Mercutio and Tybalt’s deaths, they played a song from the animated movie “Book of Life”, and immediately my thoughts turned to why they chose to use that song, rather than the scene itself. Fortunately, this is the last complaint that I have about this adaptation.
The set was beautiful, and the lighting was excellent, complementing the scenes perfectly. For example, whenever the scene was focused on Juliet’s family, the Capulets, the lighting was fully blue, to match the blue color scheme of the family’s outfits. The other families’ costumes were also color-coded, making it easy to tell who was related to. There was also a small detail I noticed and appreciated relating to this: when Romeo snuck in to the Capulet’s dinner party, he wore a blue bandanna around his neck to fit in. The fight choreography was amazing and always exciting, and the background characters managed to have something to do without distracting from the focus of the scene.
In the program is a note from director Raphael Massie, where he explains that with this adaptation, he wanted to express how love is all all-powerful force that allows people to see “just how inconsequential the differences we use to discriminate are by comparison. We are one humanity.” From the outside looking in, it may seem that the suicides of the protagonists in the show’s finale would go against this, but their love is not the only such bond in the play, with there also being a large focus on friendships and family relationships, and in the end, the legacy of the tragic lovers ensures peace at last for those who survived. As Massie says, “Love is the answer.”
