Safe to describe it as mixed.
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"Who can forget the classic first line of “Romeo and Juliet”: “How y’all doin’ today?”
Well, perhaps not so classic. But as uttered at the start of the play’s 36th Broadway revival, which opened Thursday at Circle in the Square, the words are certainly more welcoming to the production’s youthful target audience than the traditional iambic pentameter ones: “Two households, both alike in dignity.”
Not that there are two households in the director Sam Gold’s rec-room adaptation anyway. Romeo’s parents, along with a clutch of other characters, have been discarded. Juliet’s are both played by one actor, with little more than a change of inflection. And though Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler, the box-office draws, cover just one star-crossed lover each — he a beagly Romeo, she a beamish Juliet — the other eight cast members take on 17 roles, adorably if often indistinguishably. It’s a puppy pile.
But before you wonder whether this production was sponsored by CliffsNotes, with only as much poetry and staying power as an Instagram story, bear in mind that many of the characters are teenagers, and that the play may most usefully be directed at people seeing it for the first time, not the 36th. Certainly Gold has used everything in his formidable toolbox — scissors, hammers, punches, wrenches — to get young people interested in a world that looks more like theirs than Elizabethan London or Renaissance Verona.
So after an energetic preshow, filled with flirting, peacocking and snits of aggression, the story begins with that casual greeting from Gabby Beans, the play’s Chorus. Beans, later a hotheaded Mercutio, a beneficent Friar Lawrence and a barely there Prince Escalus, makes a relatable hype woman, introducing the rest of the cast by first name and telling us whom they’ll be playing. If you’re confused — and even a frequent flier might be — you can consult a program insert that visualizes the Montagues and Capulets as a mood board.
Moody the show is. The funky-sparkly costumes (by Enver Chakartash) and the dusky-stroby lighting (by Isabella Byrd) create a feeling of extremes without much middle. The music, by Taylor Swift’s producer Jack Antonoff, which at one point includes a lusty performance of “We Are Young,” does the same, except when throbbing or noodling anxiously in the background as if to ensure that the spell goes unbroken.
That’s mostly harmless and entirely unnecessary. Connor needs no help in keeping and maintaining the emotional temperature, easily enlarging the tenderness and obliviousness of his Nick on “Heartstopper” to fit the stage. When he looks into Juliet’s eyes, you see what he wants and how seriously he wants it; when he walks among his riotous peers, as they hump Teddy bears and sniff out insults, you see how little that means to him now.
Connor is also a very physical actor, or at any rate his recently beefed-up, often tank-topped body is given a workout. Instead of just climbing to Juliet’s balcony — represented by the design collective dots as a flowery bed that descends from the heavens — he does a leaping pull-up from the ground to get there, then lifts himself farther to achieve full face time. This is a lover with lats.
But a manly Romeo and a tiny Juliet — Connor is nearly a foot taller than Zegler — creates, or reinforces, a problem. It’s disturbing enough in the Shakespeare when Lady Capulet tells her 13-year-old daughter that “ladies of esteem” her age are “already made mothers.” With an actor who, despite his baby face, looks much older than his years (Connor is 20) and an actress who looks much younger than hers (Zegler is 23) you’re left in an indeterminate space between ancient and current levels of ick.