<b>ROMEO & jULIET: Abridged</b> Across the region/Shakespeare In Delaware Park SpeakupWNY | Buffalo NY and Buffalo News

Through August 11
"ROMEO AND JULIET: Abridged" Across Western New York/Shakespeare in Delaware Park

By Augustine Warner

For theater companies and directors, William Shakespeare�s plays have a colossal advantage�no copyright.
That means you can do anything you want with them.
I remember a conversation with Shaw Festival impresario Christopher Newton talking about working with the Shaw Trust to tinker with George Bernard Shaw�s plays because at that time they were still under copyright in Canada.
For Shakespeare, no need since he has been dead for four centuries.
Certainly, over the years, Shakespeare in Delaware Park has tinkered and it�s tinkering again this year with �Romeo and Juliet: Abridged,� the company�s road show.
This takes the Bard out into areas where people are, with residents who might not be familiar with live theater or where people might be reluctant to see productions on Shakespeare Hill in Delaware Park.
On mobile stages, �R&J� is not much more than an hour, cut across the board by director Brendan Didio to make it palatable.
Some of the cuts aren�t surprising, the party scene early on when Romeo and Juliet meet, father and daughter fighting about a quick marriage to the County Paris and much of the scene around Juliet�s balcony in Verona.
I get it, with a goal to keep it short.
At the same time, the script has to work and there are stutter steps here, particularly the final suicide scene in the tomb and the events leading up to it.
As part of the cutting, the cast is down to five, with all playing multiple roles.
That�s always hard, to help the audience figure out what character a particular performer is playing at a particular time
Here, it�s basically a system of colorful vests from E. L. Hohn to distinguish Patrick Burke as Tybalt from Burke as Lady Capulet or Tabitha Raithel as Juliet from Raithel as Benvolio.
I don�t want to suggest these scripts can�t be cut, because they can and certainly the size of a Shakespearean cast varies.
If you have seen �Hamlet� a number of times, consider how many bodies there are on stage in the last scene.
It all can work.
What is required is a sense of why change is being made, what�s accomplished with smaller casts, multiple roles for cast members, why the cast is all female.
Every director who makes big changes in classic plays should be required to explain in one sentence: Why the changes?
If you can�t answer that, try again.
Here, the cast tries hard and there are relatively strong performances from The Five.
A caution: If you have never seen the play or never read it, there may be some glitches as you watch what�s going on.
To an extent that�s because these are Elizabethan boys behaving badly because that�s the custom and the lethal scuffling between the Montague faction and the Capulet faction shows that street brawls can go very bad, very fast.
Okay, anyway, take advantage of the chance and see �Romeo and Juliet" Abridged,� when it�s nearby, with a list on the Shakespeare in Delaware Park website.
It�s a great and memorable and basic play for modern theater and literature.
And, listen.
Shakespeare is considered one of the fathers of modern English (along with the committee which did the King James version of the Bible) and you can learn something from what this Warwickshire native did to create the English we speak today.