Review: ROMEO AND JULIET at Canadian Stage

The romantic tragedy and big emotions of Shakespeare’s famous tale of star-crossed lovers are difficult to successfully present in an age of irony. This is especially true in outdoor summer theatre, where the atmosphere lends itself more to a fun romp than heartbreak. But a tale of intractable families who nurture their hatred over everything else should feel sadly immediate regardless of where it’s performed.

The temperature drop and gusting winds at the opening of Canadian Stage’s Dream in High Park, celebrating 42 years, provided a cooling backdrop to director Marie Farsi’s take on ROMEO AND JULIET, set in 1930s Italy. While Farsi’s production presents promising performances and is a serviceable, fast-paced take that hits most of the expected beats of the iconic play, it would benefit from a greater sense of internal clarity surrounding its setting and goals.

The most important element of ROMEO AND JULIET is, of course, the title characters. Praneet Akilla’s Romeo and Lili Beaudoin’s Juliet (aged up to 17 in this text) are endearing and have good chemistry, focusing on the gentle moments within the bombastic declarations of love. Akilla’s voice cracks when he’s feeling particularly nervous. He effectively postures to show his devotion, dramatically hanging off the lip of Juliet’s lovely balcony, a slightly perilous-looking sitting area designed by Sim Suzer. Suzer also provides benches downstairs that recombine into the nuptial bed in a nifty piece of choreography by Stephen Cota. Beaudoin’s Juliet in particular has a fiery spirit, delivering her speeches with youthful impatience and conviction and trading barbs with her beleaguered Nurse (Michaela Washburn).

Around the young lovers, Diego Matamoros gives Friar Lawrence a sense of paternal compassion as a man who often finds himself to be the only adult in the room, and Dan Mousseau’s Mercutio takes his role to liven things up very seriously, wheeling around with a purloined wine bottle concealed in his jacket.

The 1930s Italy setting gives Suzer a chance to play with newsboy caps and summer dresses. Farsi begins the piece with an atmospheric duet (sound designer/composer Olivia Wheeler) sung with gusto by Matamoros and Matthew G. Brown, putting in cute jokes about espressos, sprinkling in side conversations in Italian, and presenting Juliet’s faked death to the unnerving backdrop of a record player left turning long after the music’s finished.

On the other hand, while Farsi’s choice to set the play in Italy’s interwar period of rising fascism is a strong and relevant one, the setting comes across far more in an aesthetic rather than thematic sense. That’s because the production doesn’t entirely commit to or show clear reasoning for many of its choices, some of which are puzzling given its stated intentions.

“In this landscape, cycles of violence and vengeance are passed down like inheritance,” writes Farsi in her director’s note, but the production skirts around the generational transfer. It’s understandable that the already small roles for the Montague parents are excised for casting reasons, but this results in a removal of one of the “two households” crucial to the message of the piece. This creates a depiction of the family vendetta in echo, rather than a direct demonstration of how adults pass down their prejudices.

The minimized conflict between the parents leaves Ziska Louis’ seething Tybalt to carry most of the weight of the feud for the first half of the play, making him seem an unhinged outlier rather than a representative family member. Even more strangely, Farsi has Capulet welcome a completely undisguised cadre of Montagues into his fateful party where the original text describes them as masked, removing the danger of discovery and thus the scene’s suspense (and any reason for Juliet not to recognize the son of her family’s most hated neighbours until it’s too late).

Farsi’s note says that one purpose of the show is to explore the time period’s “rigid gender roles”. However, the production only partially follows through. For one example, Benvolio (Meilie Ng) uses she/her pronouns without this changing any of the rights, expectations, or privileges afforded to the character, leading instead to the impression that the Capulets are just uncommonly repressive. Cross-gender and gender-swapped casting are both great ways to play with classics when they work with or are neutral to the production’s stated goal.

As well, the overall trim of the play removes most of the more overtly sexist moments referring to harsh gender roles in Shakespeare’s work—easily cut because they’re not plot-relevant and, yes, frankly tiresome, but they might have helped reinforce this supposedly essential theme.

When the production commits, though, it shows its teeth. One chillingly effective scene features Mike Shara’s Capulet, otherwise a genial, affable host who speaks like a confused Muppet, turning on a dime to excoriate his child for not bending to his authority. His silky protestations to suitor Paris (Daniel Krmpotic) early on about the importance of his dear daughter’s consent evaporate immediately when Juliet actually tries to exercise that right. The contrast of Shara’s sudden explosion makes it abundantly clear why Juliet feels trapped enough to seek a way out, no matter how extreme.

As well, the excision of the Montagues leads to an intriguing, resolution-less ending. Farsi tantalizingly cuts most of the denouement, pushing away the shock and reconciliation of the characters left behind to focus on a tragic tableau and epilogue. There’s no room for “thoughts and prayers” here, just the facts of what’s happened.

Overall, though, in a time where divisions run deep and feuds bubble up everywhere, the meaningless but deadly conflict between the Montagues and Capulets should be more of a “happy dagger” to the heart.

To post a comment, you must register and login.