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Who can forget the classic first line of “Romeo and Juliet”: “How y’all doin’ today?”
Well, perhaps not so classic. But as uttered at the start of the play’s 36th Broadway revival, which opened Thursday at Circle in the Square, the words are certainly more welcoming to the production’s youthful target audience than the traditional iambic pentameter ones: “Two households, both alike in dignity.”
Not that there are two households in the director Sam Gold’s rec-room adaptation anyway. Romeo’s parents, along with a clutch of other characters, have been discarded. Juliet’s are both played by one actor, with little more than a change of inflection. And though Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler, the box-office draws, cover just one star-crossed lover each — he a beagly Romeo, she a beamish Juliet — the other eight cast members take on 17 roles, adorably if often indistinguishably. It’s a puppy pile.
But before you wonder whether this production was sponsored by CliffsNotes, with only as much poetry and staying power as an Instagram story, bear in mind that many of the characters are teenagers, and that the play may most usefully be directed at people seeing it for the first time, not the 36th. Certainly Gold has used everything in his formidable toolbox — scissors, hammers, punches, wrenches — to get young people interested in a world that looks more like theirs than Elizabethan London or Renaissance Verona.
So after an energetic preshow, filled with flirting, peacocking and snits of aggression, the story begins with that casual greeting from Gabby Beans, the play’s Chorus. Beans, later a hotheaded Mercutio, a beneficent Friar Lawrence and a barely there Prince Escalus, makes a relatable hype woman, introducing the rest of the cast by first name and telling us whom they’ll be playing. If you’re confused — and even a frequent flier might be — you can consult a program insert that visualizes the Montagues and Capulets as a mood board.
Moody the show is. The funky-sparkly costumes (by Enver Chakartash) and the dusky-stroby lighting (by Isabella Byrd) create a feeling of extremes without much middle. The music, by Taylor Swift’s producer Jack Antonoff, which at one point includes a lusty performance of “We Are Young,” does the same, except when throbbing or noodling anxiously in the background as if to ensure that the spell goes unbroken.
That’s mostly harmless and entirely unnecessary. Connor needs no help in keeping and maintaining the emotional temperature, easily enlarging the tenderness and obliviousness of his Nick on “Heartstopper” to fit the stage. When he looks into Juliet’s eyes, you see what he wants and how seriously he wants it; when he walks among his riotous peers, as they hump Teddy bears and sniff out insults, you see how little that means to him now.
Connor is also a very physical actor, or at any rate his recently beefed-up, often tank-topped body is given a workout. Instead of just climbing to Juliet’s balcony — represented by the design collective dots as a flowery bed that descends from the heavens — he does a leaping pull-up from the ground to get there, then lifts himself farther to achieve full face time. This is a lover with lats.
But a manly Romeo and a tiny Juliet — Connor is nearly a foot taller than Zegler — creates, or reinforces, a problem. It’s disturbing enough in the Shakespeare when Lady Capulet tells her 13-year-old daughter that “ladies of esteem” her age are “already made mothers.” With an actor who, despite his baby face, looks much older than his years (Connor is 20) and an actress who looks much younger than hers (Zegler is 23) you’re left in an indeterminate space between ancient and current levels of ick.
It’s wise, then, that despite the supercharged sexuality of the staging otherwise, Gold limits the pair’s lovemaking to gropes and kisses. Yet Zegler, perhaps like Juliet, gets shortchanged in the process. She is immensely appealing as a bubbly ingénue, with an easy, brilliant, good-girl smile and the crafty intelligence of a captive who sees a key. Her take on Paris, the man her father intends her to marry — a man hilariously dressed in a “Gift of God” T-shirt — is priceless; she can’t wipe his kiss of her mouth fast enough.
But as with her Maria, the Juliet-analog she played in the 2021 remake of “West Side Story,” Zegler does not quite stick the landing. She remains relatively clearheaded as Juliet is transformed by society’s rules into a woman who, seeing only one way to exert her power, uses it. The tragedy here is not tragic enough.
That feels deliberate. Gold’s staging is perhaps the busiest and funniest I’ve seen, a lot of the humor coming from the dotty nurse, whom Shakespeare designed for that purpose. (She is played with Valley Girl snark by Tommy Dorfman, who also plays Tybalt.) And though there is, of course, violence, it is broadly mimed and deliberately mild. What the production emphasizes instead is unfairness, as teenagers tend to do as well, wanting limits to excuse their whining. Sola Fadiran’s Capulet (if not so much his conventional Mrs.) is fierce enough in his treatment of Juliet that I wanted to whine as well.
The play is thus less terrifying than teenifying — hence the plus sign instead of the “and” in the title. The lobby, lit like a junior high school prom, offers not just the expected merch and specialty mocktails but a table where ticket holders can learn about registering to vote. The choreography by Sonya Tayeh lands perfectly in the zone between professional movement and what a nerd might do in front of a mirror. Fangirling and fanboying are strongly encouraged. There is nothing unlikable about any of this.
It’s a little slick, though, at least for seen-that adults. The play’s twisty language, expressive of twisty thoughts, is largely untangled but, in the process, flattened. (Gold’s edit brings the running time, not counting intermission, to “the two hours’ traffic of the stage” Shakespeare mentions, but some of that traffic is stop-and-go.) I smiled a lot but never came close to crying.
Is that a reasonable response to aim for when staging the world’s most famous weepie? For me, seeing so many young people engaged, it is. Perhaps, as Shakespeare commands in the play’s closing speech, they will “Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things.” And so what if the production achieves that goal by protecting them from too much unruly feeling, just as the Capulets aimed to protect Juliet? Probably, the Capulets were right.
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