Through Sunday
& Juliet Shea’s Mainstage
By Augustine Warner
The last time we checked on Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet, they were dead.
Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” has been a core on the playwright’s list of plays, done and re-done on stage and screen.
It’s also been the basis of other material, like “West Side Story.”
Now, Max Martin and friends and David West Read have taken the play and tinkered with it and I don’t mean the way Shakespeare in Delaware Park tinkers with the Bard.
Those “friends” with Martin are well-known musicians, like Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and Bon Jovi.
The show in Shea’s has some great music from those artists, certainly great dancing and the latest in the giant visual displays now common in theaters.
The script and story?
Well…That’s the problem.
The premise is Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway (Teal Wicks), comes to London for the opening of R&J and finding out her usually absent husband’s plot line in the play and those ultimate deaths.
Supported by the cast members, he agrees to her plans to keep Juliet (Rachel Simone Webb) alive and moving on.
She heads off to Paris and starts making some of the same mistakes she made in Verona, particularly after finding out she was only the latest young woman or man involved with Romeo.
This is something out of “Star Trek,” with the battling Hathaway and Shakespeare (Corey Mach) disputing how to tell the tale, while inside it.
A non-binary friend of Juliet’s, May (Nick Drake) talks of problems in a binary world, “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.”
There’s François (Mateus Leite Cardoso) who starts falling in love with Juliet.
This all starts falling into place when their childhood nurses turn out to be the same person, Angelique (Kathryn Allison).
When in Paris she became sexually involved with François’ father, Lance (Paul-Jordan Jansen).
The sexual and personal relationships become utterly entangled, while the band pounds away with the music to explicate what’s going on,
Juliet agonizes about Romeo after waking up in bed with François, “Oops…I Did It Again.”
Shakespeare brings Romeo (Michael Canu) back from the dead and throws him into this sea of lust.
If you think this is easy to follow when sitting in the theater, you’re wrong because the relationships shift constantly.
In the crunch, François bails out of the wedding, saying he’s interested in May.
It’s crazy, to the point Anne and Shakespeare agree not to have a conclusive ending: no dead bodies.
Instead, marriages occur, relationships are born and re-born and a playwright makes peace with his wife back home in his second best bed.
It’s not Shakespeare and it can be really preachy but it is entertaining.
It’s also loud, very very loud, to the point I saw those earphones for the hard of hearing being returned at the intermission as unnecessary.
Still, the dancing is good and there are a number of good voices, especially Webb’s Juliet and Drakes’s May.
The original production team worked hard to shape this show and I have never seen so many management credits for a show, suggesting lots of constant work, early on.
Still, Anne Hathaway’s original push to bring back Juliet from the tomb death is often submerged in the culture wars.
“& Juliet” is worth seeing, even with the cultural warfare.
© Copyright 2024 - Speakupwny.com
hosted by Online Media, Inc
Buffalo Web Design and Web Hosting
Top of Page
|
