Romeo and Juliet
Sep. 11th, 2024 12:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraRomeo and Juliet at the ART. Cut for being long. R&J has always been my favorite Shakespeare play. I suppose I'm at an age where I'm supposed to have switched over to Macbeth or Lear or something, but I haven't. J (kid J) read it for class last year and they watched parts of the Luhrmann movie (and like one scene of the Zefirelli), but I wanted her to see all of both so we did that (I feel like they're both worth watching as movies and not just sources of scenes!), and then ART was putting it on with some television teen heartthrob as Romeo (Rudy Pankow, he was in something called Outer Banks that I guess J and her friends all watched), so we went!
I can remember when my mom started taking me with her to the theater in high school, like we had gone to certain shows before that but I feel like there was a sort of shift from "this is a Special Outing, kids" to a mix of "do we want to see this, let's make a mutual decision to go" and "I want to see this and I might as well invite you (me) for theater-going company", like, I don't know, my mom and I did not get along super well when I was in high school but it was something we could do together that we enjoyed and where our relationship was able to evolve a little in the direction of me being a fellow person instead of A Kid. So it was neat to be there with my kid who has herself reached the age of being a fellow theater-goer.
As for the actual production, it was good! I have gone through a lot of stages with how I relate to this play, from "I am younger than Juliet and feel super awkward performing this balcony scene" from when my 6th grade class put on an abridged version, to "I am also a Pining Teen" to "wow, they seem young" to "wow, they seem young" to "huh, I guess I must be about Lady Cap's age" to "my daughter is Juliet's age" to "I guess I'm the nurse's age" (I am older than Pat Heywood was in the Zefirelli movie but younger than Miriam Margolyes was in the Luhrmann) or perhaps Friar Lawrence's age (Pete Postlethwaite was about 50 when he was in Luhrmann's), and the way I tend to think about who drives the action and outcome of the play has shifted with that, from "of course the adults are just immovable forces of nature and Romeo and Juliet are making the choices inside those limits" to "of course the teens are just wild forces of nature and here are all the adult decisions that channel them into this tragic outcome". So one of the things I liked about this was a relative centering of Friar Lawrence, giving him the prologue, and keeping in his post-climactic recap/explanation of what happened. (And did they give him the epilogue too, instead of the Prince? Or cut it entirely? It's already blurry in my head - but it was already blurry by the time I got home. I should ask J.) In any case, the play reached the end of the script with Romeo and Juliet together on a tomb center stage, and Friar Lawrence slumped at the base of it, centered on the stage, with the whole surviving cast around him starting to quarrel again. And then they did something so cool.
To explain I have to backtrack to talk about the set. It was a very minimalist/brutalist sort of set, just one large wood-colored rectangular monolith on the stage to start that got pushed and spun, and then the middle came out to be a window, and then a couple of other smaller wooden box/platform shapes came out, and then in the last act the whole floor got hooked up to wires and raised, first to the level where Juliet was lying, and then just above, so she was now in a grave, and then to make a low ceiling over the vault. (Which was really cool.) So it was all very stark and industrial, and even in the party scene the party decorations were just large glowing spheres, very cold white light, that the party guests held and moved around in various ways. The only time there was anything organic present was in scenes with Friar Lawrence, who tended some plants placed on one of the wooden box parts, and gave Romeo and Juliet plant crowns for the wedding scene and presided over it with some branches. And then at the end, when it seemed like the play might be over, having run out of lines, Juliet flopped her hand down to Friar Lawrence and handed him a flower, which he planted on the stage, and then someone else... the Prince first, maybe?? but eventually the whole cast started bringing out plant set pieces, in baskets and pots, and then pulling forward these whole, like, grass carpets with rakes, and the lighting shifted, and Mercutio and Tybalt and Lady Mont were also there silently gardening, and Romeo and Juliet stood up on their tomb which bloomed with white flowers around their feet. It was a lovely bit of theater magic watching the stage transform, and a neat move to actually try to show "with their death healed their parents' strife" rather than just asserting it, like, what that could look like or feel like, and it felt like a redemption of Friar Lawrence whose stupid plan the whole plan always is. But maybe it all came from this hopeful, healing place, even the vial for Juliet (because we got to see him preparing it from his plants). I mean, maybe he doesn't deserve redemption, fair question, but it was an interesting thing for the play to choose to say; I like it when productions of things I know find something new or different to do or say about them.
(If anyone is enough curious about this to want to see some photos, I took a couple during the bows and you can sort of see what the stage ended up like. I don't want to link the album here but if you know me feel free to ask for the link.)
They made one other change I did not particularly like, giving Balthasar's part to Benvolio. Trying to condense/simplify the cast, I assume, but I feel like the dynamic of Balthasar leaving Romeo at the vault works because Romeo has rank/authority over him (or, like, in the Luhrmann, Balthasar is just a kid), and if it's Benvolio (who was cast here as taller/stronger looking than Rudy Pankow, whose height I think the internet is lying about - or maybe it was deliberate costuming?) it felt *so* obvious that Romeo was not in a good place, and unreasonable and out of character for Benvolio to just leave him. That's his one surviving best friend! Of course Friar Lawrence also has to pull his "I dare no longer stay" for the play to go forward, which also felt pretty unmotivated here, so possibly we were just supposed to not think about it because we know how the story has to go. I did particularly like their casting of Mercutio: Clay Singer was a lot of fun doing goofy voices and accents. I'm always particularly interested in how they're going to play that character. (I reeeeally wanted to be a Mercutio in one of our four casts in the 6th grade, but was Not Allowed on account of Girl (although I was given a Benvolio as a consolation prize, the only significant cross-gender-casting anyone got to do (despite a fabulous tryout by one of the boys for the Nurse, probably the best audition anyone did for any part))).
*Huh*, and my next thought there was "of course I'm way too old to be a Mercutio now" but now I'm thinking about an age-inverted Romeo and Juliet where the young people are all old people in some kind of assisted living setting, and the parents are instead their middle-aged children, who have some kind of legal/property battle going on that sometimes spills over into the residents of Verona's one old age home scuffling. Which is terrifying for Director Escalus! Someone could get seriously hurt the next time Tybalt or Benvolio decides to swing his cane at someone! The Capulet kids decide to throw a little party for some of their residents - they're trying to fix up Grandma Juliet with Paris for some kind of inheritance reasons, maybe related to the ongoing legal dispute. But Romeo (who's been grieving for his first wife, Rosaline) sneaks in and meets Juliet (whose first husband died when her kids were still little), and they fall in love, and the young visiting priest Father Lawrence (who is, like, fresh out of the seminary, as young as a priest can be and still have priest powers) thinks it's romantic and marries them. And then Mercutio gets into it with Tybalt - Mercutio has some dementia going on? like sometimes he's still witty but the Mab speech is very... wandering. And Tybalt hits him in the head with his quad cane, and Romeo hits Tybalt in the head with *his* cane (where is all the staff? they're underfunded...), and so the director is like, look, you have to transfer him to the memory care facility in Mantua, this isn't a safe placement any more. And Juliet's son tells her that if she doesn't marry Paris he's not going to be able to afford to keep her there and she's going to have to beg or starve or die in the streets, he can't help her, and Juliet's health aide is like "I think you better do it, ma'am", and Juliet is like "I would prefer medical assistance in dying to marrying Paris", which should not be the only choices! but this is all about how there are no resources for this aging generation! And Lawrence is like, okay, what if you *faked* an overdose and we snuck you out to see Romeo again, thinking this might give her the will to live, only one of the aides who works in both places tells Romeo that Juliet has died, and he manages to get out of the locked unit in Mantua and elope back to Verona, finding Juliet at the... Verona skilled nursing unit awaiting transport to a funeral home (which Lawrence has plans to intercept) and overdoses on his - heart medication? something - only to have Juliet then wake up and find him and pick up some kind of magnetic toy from the nurse's desk and deactivate her own pacemaker. And then Lawrence (the youngest person in the show, remember) is trying to explain to Escalus what happened, while you can see the middle-aged kids looking at each other realizing that they're next if they can't improve things, and the grandchildren generation (who we've really only seen at Juliet's party, so far, or silently in the wake of their noisy parents) sort of coming forward and coalescing as a presence onstage watching them. I suppose this would have to be more of a West Side Story than an R&J, like you'd have to rewrite some of the dialogue... although, I don't know, it would be more interesting to try to do the whole thing purely through casting/costuming choices, and very careful cutting choices about which lines got performed. Because that's where it gets really interesting, right? Romeo's "madness most discreet" speech not as teen pining, but as a man mourning a long happy marriage. Juliet's impatience someone who never expected to have a second chance and who knows she doesn't have a lot of time. And all the old men confused and aggressive in a sundowning kind of way. Man, I want to see someone stage this now.
I can remember when my mom started taking me with her to the theater in high school, like we had gone to certain shows before that but I feel like there was a sort of shift from "this is a Special Outing, kids" to a mix of "do we want to see this, let's make a mutual decision to go" and "I want to see this and I might as well invite you (me) for theater-going company", like, I don't know, my mom and I did not get along super well when I was in high school but it was something we could do together that we enjoyed and where our relationship was able to evolve a little in the direction of me being a fellow person instead of A Kid. So it was neat to be there with my kid who has herself reached the age of being a fellow theater-goer.
As for the actual production, it was good! I have gone through a lot of stages with how I relate to this play, from "I am younger than Juliet and feel super awkward performing this balcony scene" from when my 6th grade class put on an abridged version, to "I am also a Pining Teen" to "wow, they seem young" to "wow, they seem young" to "huh, I guess I must be about Lady Cap's age" to "my daughter is Juliet's age" to "I guess I'm the nurse's age" (I am older than Pat Heywood was in the Zefirelli movie but younger than Miriam Margolyes was in the Luhrmann) or perhaps Friar Lawrence's age (Pete Postlethwaite was about 50 when he was in Luhrmann's), and the way I tend to think about who drives the action and outcome of the play has shifted with that, from "of course the adults are just immovable forces of nature and Romeo and Juliet are making the choices inside those limits" to "of course the teens are just wild forces of nature and here are all the adult decisions that channel them into this tragic outcome". So one of the things I liked about this was a relative centering of Friar Lawrence, giving him the prologue, and keeping in his post-climactic recap/explanation of what happened. (And did they give him the epilogue too, instead of the Prince? Or cut it entirely? It's already blurry in my head - but it was already blurry by the time I got home. I should ask J.) In any case, the play reached the end of the script with Romeo and Juliet together on a tomb center stage, and Friar Lawrence slumped at the base of it, centered on the stage, with the whole surviving cast around him starting to quarrel again. And then they did something so cool.
To explain I have to backtrack to talk about the set. It was a very minimalist/brutalist sort of set, just one large wood-colored rectangular monolith on the stage to start that got pushed and spun, and then the middle came out to be a window, and then a couple of other smaller wooden box/platform shapes came out, and then in the last act the whole floor got hooked up to wires and raised, first to the level where Juliet was lying, and then just above, so she was now in a grave, and then to make a low ceiling over the vault. (Which was really cool.) So it was all very stark and industrial, and even in the party scene the party decorations were just large glowing spheres, very cold white light, that the party guests held and moved around in various ways. The only time there was anything organic present was in scenes with Friar Lawrence, who tended some plants placed on one of the wooden box parts, and gave Romeo and Juliet plant crowns for the wedding scene and presided over it with some branches. And then at the end, when it seemed like the play might be over, having run out of lines, Juliet flopped her hand down to Friar Lawrence and handed him a flower, which he planted on the stage, and then someone else... the Prince first, maybe?? but eventually the whole cast started bringing out plant set pieces, in baskets and pots, and then pulling forward these whole, like, grass carpets with rakes, and the lighting shifted, and Mercutio and Tybalt and Lady Mont were also there silently gardening, and Romeo and Juliet stood up on their tomb which bloomed with white flowers around their feet. It was a lovely bit of theater magic watching the stage transform, and a neat move to actually try to show "with their death healed their parents' strife" rather than just asserting it, like, what that could look like or feel like, and it felt like a redemption of Friar Lawrence whose stupid plan the whole plan always is. But maybe it all came from this hopeful, healing place, even the vial for Juliet (because we got to see him preparing it from his plants). I mean, maybe he doesn't deserve redemption, fair question, but it was an interesting thing for the play to choose to say; I like it when productions of things I know find something new or different to do or say about them.
(If anyone is enough curious about this to want to see some photos, I took a couple during the bows and you can sort of see what the stage ended up like. I don't want to link the album here but if you know me feel free to ask for the link.)
They made one other change I did not particularly like, giving Balthasar's part to Benvolio. Trying to condense/simplify the cast, I assume, but I feel like the dynamic of Balthasar leaving Romeo at the vault works because Romeo has rank/authority over him (or, like, in the Luhrmann, Balthasar is just a kid), and if it's Benvolio (who was cast here as taller/stronger looking than Rudy Pankow, whose height I think the internet is lying about - or maybe it was deliberate costuming?) it felt *so* obvious that Romeo was not in a good place, and unreasonable and out of character for Benvolio to just leave him. That's his one surviving best friend! Of course Friar Lawrence also has to pull his "I dare no longer stay" for the play to go forward, which also felt pretty unmotivated here, so possibly we were just supposed to not think about it because we know how the story has to go. I did particularly like their casting of Mercutio: Clay Singer was a lot of fun doing goofy voices and accents. I'm always particularly interested in how they're going to play that character. (I reeeeally wanted to be a Mercutio in one of our four casts in the 6th grade, but was Not Allowed on account of Girl (although I was given a Benvolio as a consolation prize, the only significant cross-gender-casting anyone got to do (despite a fabulous tryout by one of the boys for the Nurse, probably the best audition anyone did for any part))).
*Huh*, and my next thought there was "of course I'm way too old to be a Mercutio now" but now I'm thinking about an age-inverted Romeo and Juliet where the young people are all old people in some kind of assisted living setting, and the parents are instead their middle-aged children, who have some kind of legal/property battle going on that sometimes spills over into the residents of Verona's one old age home scuffling. Which is terrifying for Director Escalus! Someone could get seriously hurt the next time Tybalt or Benvolio decides to swing his cane at someone! The Capulet kids decide to throw a little party for some of their residents - they're trying to fix up Grandma Juliet with Paris for some kind of inheritance reasons, maybe related to the ongoing legal dispute. But Romeo (who's been grieving for his first wife, Rosaline) sneaks in and meets Juliet (whose first husband died when her kids were still little), and they fall in love, and the young visiting priest Father Lawrence (who is, like, fresh out of the seminary, as young as a priest can be and still have priest powers) thinks it's romantic and marries them. And then Mercutio gets into it with Tybalt - Mercutio has some dementia going on? like sometimes he's still witty but the Mab speech is very... wandering. And Tybalt hits him in the head with his quad cane, and Romeo hits Tybalt in the head with *his* cane (where is all the staff? they're underfunded...), and so the director is like, look, you have to transfer him to the memory care facility in Mantua, this isn't a safe placement any more. And Juliet's son tells her that if she doesn't marry Paris he's not going to be able to afford to keep her there and she's going to have to beg or starve or die in the streets, he can't help her, and Juliet's health aide is like "I think you better do it, ma'am", and Juliet is like "I would prefer medical assistance in dying to marrying Paris", which should not be the only choices! but this is all about how there are no resources for this aging generation! And Lawrence is like, okay, what if you *faked* an overdose and we snuck you out to see Romeo again, thinking this might give her the will to live, only one of the aides who works in both places tells Romeo that Juliet has died, and he manages to get out of the locked unit in Mantua and elope back to Verona, finding Juliet at the... Verona skilled nursing unit awaiting transport to a funeral home (which Lawrence has plans to intercept) and overdoses on his - heart medication? something - only to have Juliet then wake up and find him and pick up some kind of magnetic toy from the nurse's desk and deactivate her own pacemaker. And then Lawrence (the youngest person in the show, remember) is trying to explain to Escalus what happened, while you can see the middle-aged kids looking at each other realizing that they're next if they can't improve things, and the grandchildren generation (who we've really only seen at Juliet's party, so far, or silently in the wake of their noisy parents) sort of coming forward and coalescing as a presence onstage watching them. I suppose this would have to be more of a West Side Story than an R&J, like you'd have to rewrite some of the dialogue... although, I don't know, it would be more interesting to try to do the whole thing purely through casting/costuming choices, and very careful cutting choices about which lines got performed. Because that's where it gets really interesting, right? Romeo's "madness most discreet" speech not as teen pining, but as a man mourning a long happy marriage. Juliet's impatience someone who never expected to have a second chance and who knows she doesn't have a lot of time. And all the old men confused and aggressive in a sundowning kind of way. Man, I want to see someone stage this now.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-11 04:51 am (UTC)(*)Or maybe it's a movie, but then what's the soundtrack like.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-11 10:47 am (UTC)I love the idea of the old-age R&J!
Date: 2024-09-11 12:07 pm (UTC)Technically, I could try convince one of the local places to let me direct it myself, but that seems like work.
Thanks,
-V.
Re: I love the idea of the old-age R&J!
Date: 2024-09-12 12:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-13 12:08 am (UTC)More specifically:
* Yay for parents and teens getting to go to the theatre together!
* Nifty thoughts about your perspective on R&J changing as you’ve gotten older.
* The flowers-at-the-end thing sounds amazing. Super cool.
* Speaking of unexpected stuff after what the audience thought was the end :) : I also love your age-swapped R&J.
(On a side note, re cross-casting Benvolio: I forget whether I’ve mentioned to you before that in my high school production, Benvolia was played by a girl, playing her as a tomboy who was more or less in love with Romeo, and I thought that worked really well. To the extent that the few times I’ve seen versions of R&J since then, I’ve generally felt they missed an opportunity by making Benvolio male and presumably-straight. :) )