NEW YORK — In the promotional run-up to director Sam Gold’s production of “Romeo + Juliet,” much effort was made to promote the intensity of its young stars’ feelings, justifying the exorcism of that prosaic ampersand in the title in favor of an additive plus sign. That’s code for way cooler, kids, than any of the 30 or so prior Broadway revivals of the most famous love story ever penned.
Kit Connor (“Heartstopper”) and Rachel Zegler (“West Side Story”), we were told, are aptly approximate to the feelings of first love even as they’re increasingly compelled by each other, and are unfettered by boring Shakespearean conventions. Zegler told “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon that Gold had pitched the show to the young stars as being like a Choi Siwon music video, and said that the new production was intended to reflect “a group of 20-something-year-olds who broke into Circle in the Square on Broadway and have to get something out, to get something off their chests.”
Performing 20-somethings expelling their inner feelings appeals primarily to teen audiences, of course, and that (along with Connor’s huge following in the target demographic) perhaps explains why the audience for “Romeo + Juliet” has to be the youngest crowd I’ve seen on Broadway in years. And that’s no mean feat, even when you’re staging a show that most every teenager has read in class.
Alas, while the two leads are sincere, the show itself is (a) altogether too much of too much; (b) a bit of an ill-focused mess; and (c) less than engrossing.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Gold’s contempo ideas — lots of movement, an immersive sensibility, stylized physicality, original music from Jack Antonoff, choreography by Sonya Tayeh, streetwear, street attitudes, a hip live musician — it’s that they are not what matters most. They bear fruit only in concert with the more timeless fundamentals.
Can you really believe that this Romeo and Juliet have a love so overpoweringly essential that they not only risk their lives in its pursuit, but would prefer death to its absence? Not really.
You feel it more with him (Connor is a very authentic young actor) than with her (an earnest work in progress, stage-wise), but the issue is not really about the actors.
It’s about how, for teenagers in love, the world around them is just, well, stale and dull. The systemic flaw of this show is that it is so anxious to keep its audience engaged and excited by its overall imaginative landscape that it forgets that the two teens at the core are supposed to be driven crazy by all of that Montague-and-Capulet nonsense and want only to be with each other’s souls and bodies. Put more simply, the world of this show is so busy and intense, actual sex and love with one person cannot compete.
Furthermore, for all of its performative sexuality, the show is not all that sexy because, well, see above. Passion requires more stillness, more feeling, more discovery, more chosen isolation. Here, it’s like R + J are urban rich kids from private schools who already have seen and felt everything before.
So then why is this the experience of their lives? It just doesn’t feel that way.
Compounding that problem is that we don’t feel the forces demanding conformity and fighting against the radical possibility of love because the show is too worried about not being conformist overall. If the parents are all part of the same world, what exactly are the kids fighting against? It never is clear and that makes the show duller than it should be to watch, once you’ve drunk in the creative basic set-up. There’s strikingly little bonafide tension.
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Granted, you feel much community and allyship: As the Nurse, the excellent Tommy Dorfman is a highly effective caregiver but she also plays Tybalt and that needed a far sharper contrast. That’s true throughout the show, even though Gabby Beans (the Friar, Mercutio) is supportive, too.
This production does indeed feel like a company of passionate players, each familiar with and caring for the other, and genuine props to all for that, especially the wild costumes by Enver Chakartash, the sense of ensemble, but the downside is that the play-within-a-play can’t easily pop out of such of a frame. Not unless you suddenly cut it away. And that’s the core of the endeavor. Has to be. Gold seems to be attempting to do it with how his sharp technical cues bring change, but sudden shifts are not the problem.
It’s the wider metaverse where a Juliet cannot easily live and die for her Romeo.
At the Circle in the Square Theatre, 235 W 50th St., New York; romeoandjulietnyc.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
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