Romeo and Juliet – 22 December 2024

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Broadway’s 2024 rendition of Romeo and Juliet. The unapologetically queer casting and deeply insightful directorial and design choices made the production as a whole soar in ways  that made celebrity talent a beautiful part of a framework, but not the focus of the play. Though I had a hard time getting into the hyped introductions at the very beginning, the creativity of the staging and casting quickly changed the course of my feelings and opinions about the show.

Romeo (Kit Connor) and Juliet (Rachel Zegler) did not carry the show, despite being the titular characters. The stand out performances from Gabby Beans (Mercutio, Friar Lawrence), Tommy Dorfman (Tybalt, Nurse), Gian Perez (Paris, Peter, Samson), and Sola Fadiron (Lord/Lady Capulet) crossed barriers of societal impositions of type casting with impressive ease. In particular Beans showed incredible ability to differentiate between characters, while Dorfman’s nuanced gender elucidated the sexist flaws in Shakespeare’s original text but made it okay for us to laugh at them. Zegler and Perez gave fun, hyped up vocal performances, and the entire cast was committed to reciting the lines with particular vocal inflection that allowed them to resonate with the modern day world, even when that wasn’t necessarily what Shakespeare might have meant by them.

I was most enchanted with the music’s (Jack Antonoff) ability to aid the audience’s subconscious in understanding moments of text that might otherwise be a stretch. I noticed that the tones in the room changed pitch based on whether the connotations of the scene were getting better (higher) or worse (lower), and that the pulsating rhythms or lack of them signified importance. These auditory cues (Cody Spencer) were subtle, but very effective. The only moments that I really fell out of the story were moments where this flow was interrupted. The most significant one was Paris’s attempt to get the audience to sing “We Are Young” randomly in the middle of a serious scene. I do not understand director Sam Gold’s rationale for this. It was distracting and cringey at best. The others were moments when actors’ names were invoked without rationale. Why is Beans reminding us what “Rachel” said, when Zegler playing “Juliet” is the least forgettable casting decision?

I’m not sure I understand the teddy bear motif beyond innocence and its loss. Actors speaking from the catwalk were not visible to me and I’m uncertain if, sightlines wise, they were visible to anyone. Which begs the question, why make people doubt their ability to understand the piece so early in it? Staging wise, I think this had moments that really excelled in the round, and moments that held the production back because of the constraints of the round. Lighting design (Isabella Byrd) had many beautifully profound moments in addition to the flashy club pulse, and I absolutely adored the scenic (dots) flower bed. Elevated scenes in Juliet’s balcony were hard to see from below, but Romeo’s jump up to dangle from her elevated window was pricelessly funny.

Overall, the production does a brilliant job of finding the humor in the tragedy, emphasizing the age-related elements of the script that are so often ignored, and maximizing creative ways for the production to feel like an ensemble story as opposed to a tale of two star crossed lovers in a world entirely their own where nothing else matters. I’ve seen countless productions of Romeo and Juliet, and I’ve seldom cared this much about the full cast of characters. In this version, Mercutio and Tybalt are no less important to the story than Juliet and Romeo. Both Capulet parents play an equal part (and are played by the same actor). County Paris was genuinely revolting and richly developed (not the typical random guy stuck on stage who memorized some lines). The sexual innuendos were appropriately acknowledged, as were the fierce wit and overconfident wisdom.

Simultaneously relevant and faithful to the source material, this adaptation is more than its tagline, “the youth are fucked.” It’s a phenomenal display of world building methods that wash over the audience with lavish sensory detail. It’s a love story, marrying theatre history with our present definition of entertainment— two households, both alike in dignity.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.