ROMEO AND JULIET
What happens when you pimp out the pop in a pop masterpiece? Does it cheapen the original work by association? An unfortunate aspect of the thirty or so modern-day screen adaptations of “Romeo and Juliet” is that they minimize the attention it takes to listen to the play; filmmakers tend to amp up the characters’ knowing youthfulness, while jettisoning much of the script’s literariness. Those film adaptations have made the play difficult for many people to sit through—you can’t fast-forward it, or leave it on pause—but it may be partly the fault of how the play itself is read. Looked at a certain way, “Romeo and Juliet” is a movie, or structured like one: in a series of relatively swift and visually sensational sequences, two bodies are joined together and torn apart by the exciting forces of desire, animosity, and love. Mark Van Doren, in his exceptional book about Shakespeare, writes that the poet’s eighth play is “a tragedy which is crowded with life. . . . But it is crowded at the same time with clevernesses, it keeps the odor of ink.” That ink is what the Australian director Baz Luhrmann tried to wipe away in his interesting, 1996 modernization of the tale, which dressed up the familiarities of the plot with opera-buffa staging, Bollywood jump cuts, and nervous, lovesick closeups. In short, Luhrmann used Shakespeare to serve his own style, which is fundamentally unliterary, despite all the talk...
Romeo wakes up one morning and spots the flecks of gray in his boyish mop, and it all comes rushing back. Rosaline — she turned him down cold last night. It shouldn’t hurt this much. He’s over 500 years old and part elf — still a young man! Forever a young man! But he’s just not feeling it — not today. What to do? Maybe he’ll buy a motorcycle! Fuck, yeah: Some kitsch-encrusted retro-Brando model. He’ll roar around the artfully distressed, urban-outfitted precincts of gentrified Verona, then maybe do a little free-climbing, have a few sojutinis with the boys (who aren’t really boys anymore, either). He’ll try to forget about the old gal. Maybe make some time with a younger one. A much younger one, preferably...
A sense of divine justice seizes us whenever two of the world’s prettiest people find each other. This was true when Taylor met Burton, when Brad met Angelina, when Paris met Helen, or even when Narcissus met his reflection. We just can’t help sighing over the glory of separate souls wrapped in the luxury of shared beauty. Then there’s that other part of us that thinks, both fearfully and hopefully, “It can’t last.” Such thoughts are inevitably stirred by David Leveaux’s lopsided production of “Romeo and Juliet,” which opened on Thursday night at the Richard Rodgers Theater, with the equally exquisite-looking Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad in the title roles. When these doomed lovers first set eyes on each other, it’s so obvious that they’re a matched set — and that they know it — that the whole world seems to stand still in deference...