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.
Gold's production — featuring buzzy young stars Kit Connor (Heartstopper) and Rachel Zegler (West Side Story) in the title roles — aims to do the same for Generation Z, and in much the same way. The result is hit-and-miss. Sporty streetwear, gender-swapped casting, and original pop songs by of-the-moment music producer Jack Antonoff are all on display in the Circle in the Square Theatre, transformed into something like the site of an unsupervised high school house party. Stuffed animals are strewn about, characters take swigs from a gallon jug of an unidentified blood-red drink, and everyone's running and raging and singing with abandon. The whole thing is undeniably entertaining, but the additions of Antonoff's songs, Sonya Tayeh's choreography, and intermittent modern slang don't serve the play as much as they feel like empty spectacle, inserted out of fear its target audience — short-form TikTok devotees, per the stereotypes of us Gen Z-ers — won't otherwise stay engaged for 2.5 hours.
It turns out that, aside from some harmless frippery on the edges of the production, this is a remarkably strong Romeo + Juliet, performed in the round at Circle in the Square. Once the cast is done performing capital-C-coolness, as they do in the mosh pit-like rave scene that opens the show, they launch into an appealingly well-acted, sleek adaptation of the well-known tale. Working with the dramaturgs Michael Sexton and Ayanna Thompson, and whittling it into a potent two-hours-ten plus intermission, Gold has focused the play’s energy onto its social dynamics.
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