Sam Gold’s sexy, rock-infused production of Romeo + Juliet is messy and unwieldy but succeeds in tearing our hearts out. Like Gold’s previous Broadway Shakespearean outings—his hodgepodge King Lear with Glenda Jackson and his jumbled Macbeth with Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga— his R + J is messy, but there is a method to its scattered madness.
The star-crossed lovers and their families are out of control, fiery, and the production mirrors that white-hot intensity and disorder. The rock-club set by the design team of dots is littered with stuffed animals of all sizes, like a high school on Valentine’s Day, reflecting the characters’ immaturity and their discovery of first love. The costumes by Enver Chakartash are hip and form-fitting while Isabella Byrd’s lighting creates romantic and ominous environments and moods. Halfway through the first act, the central floor flips open to reveal a carpet of flowers. Juliet’s bed descends from the flies for Romeo to chin himself up on. All of these elements contribute to the head-rush atmosphere of impulsive love, beyond the puppy stage and also impulsive violence which tears the lovers and their families apart.
Identities and genders are fused and confounded. The same actor, Sola Fadiran, plays both mother and father to Juliet. (This is the only role-doubling that doesn’t work for me. Fadiran makes a credible blustering Lord Capulet but minces swishily as the Lady. He doesn’t always differentiate between the two, so it’s confusing at times.) The transgender actress Tommy Dorfman plays the Nurse and Tybalt, bring out the masculine and feminine aspects of each character. The Prince of Verona, Mercutio and Friar Laurence are played by the estimable Gabby Beans, who acts as a narrator of the action, guiding us along passion’s paths. She also provides juicy japery as Mercurio and sage sturdiness as the Friar.
The leads are perfectly cast. Hunky Kit Connor makes an emotionally tortured and athletic Romeo, bounding from platform to platform and from infatuation to pure love. Rachel Zegler, who played the Juliet role in Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, is equally fierce but also conveys the heroine’s precocious intuitive intelligence. She rocks Jack Antonoff’s original song “Man of the House” and provides the rock-solid center of this youthful and exciting Romeo + Juliet.
An interesting side note: the audience at the Halloween performance of R+J was much younger, and more diverse than usually seen on Broadway. It was exciting to see a youthful audience getting enthused about Shakespeare.
