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.
But Shakespeare’s greatest plays are timeless, lending themselves to endless relocations both historical and contemporary. As wild as it is, aggressively courting the TikTok generation, Gold’s revival fully commits to its concept and sustains it surprisingly well. Traditionalists might shudder at the way some of the verse is delivered, but if you’re willing to take it on its own terms, this R+J is an infectious emotional rollercoaster. And a hot shirtless Apothecary is something you don’t find at CVS.
Gold and his creative team produce some stunning tableaux on the cramped stage, and the fight scenes are athletic enough that you fear that players may end up in the laps of first-row theatergoers. But Gold himself is in his mid-40s and a lot of his attempts to youthify the material fall flat. In the hurried second act, just after the Capulets learn of the “death” of Juliet (though she is merely in a chemically induced sleep state), Gold shoehorns in a forgettable comic-relief scene featuring a Capulet servant (Gían Pérez, who also plays Samson and Paris) and a musician. The moment serves no purpose except to play a snippet of Antonoff’s fun. song “We Are Young,” to allow Pérez to drop an F-bomb, and to give music director/DJ Sarah Goldstone a single line that resonates more deeply than I suspect Gold intended: “Tis not an appropriate time to play music.” (Unless you know Shakespeare’s script, it’s not even clear that Pérez is playing a servant and not Paris, the deep-pocketed Juliet suitor whom the Capulets prefer.)
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