The youth are f**ked.
Left to their own devices in their parents’ world of violent ends, an impulsive pair of star-crossed lovers hurtle towards their inescapable fate. The intoxicating high of passion quickly descends into a brutal chaos that can only end one way.
Emmy Award winner Kit Connor (“Heartstopper”) and Golden Globe Award winner Rachel Zegler (Spielberg’s “West Side Story”) star as Romeo and Juliet in Tony Award-winning director Sam Gold’s (Fun Home, An Enemy of the People) visceral and visionary production. Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy now belongs to a new generation on the edge.
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.
Oh, yes, this revival does everything it can to reflect the unfortunate time in which not only the Montagues and the Capulets but we, too, are living. Somehow, it’s sad to be confronted with the news that the violence so stealthily and widely afflicting our society today has infiltrated so far as to include treating Shakespeare’s text violently.
1754 | Broadway |
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1869 | Broadway |
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1899 | Broadway |
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1903 | Broadway |
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1903 | Broadway |
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1904 | Broadway |
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1905 | Broadway |
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1907 | Broadway |
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1907 | Broadway |
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1909 | Broadway |
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1910 | Broadway |
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1910 | Broadway |
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1911 | Broadway |
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1911 | Broadway |
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1911 | Broadway |
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1912 | Broadway |
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1913 | Broadway |
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1915 | Broadway |
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1915 | Broadway |
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1918 | Broadway |
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1922 | Broadway |
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1922 | Broadway |
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1923 | Broadway |
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1930 | Broadway |
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1930 | Broadway |
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1934 | Broadway |
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1935 | Broadway |
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1940 | Broadway |
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1951 | Broadway |
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1956 | Off-Broadway |
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1956 | Broadway |
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1962 | Off-Broadway |
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1968 | Off-Broadway |
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1977 | Broadway |
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1986 | Broadway |
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1988 | Off-Broadway |
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1990 | Off-Broadway |
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1991 | Off-Broadway |
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2001 | Off-Broadway |
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2004 | Off-Broadway |
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2007 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway |
2013 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
2013 | Off-Broadway |
Classic Stage Company Production Off-Broadway |
2016 | West End |
Kenneth Branagh West End Revival West End |
2018 | West End |
RSC Production at the Barbican West End |
2024 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Production Broadway |
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