Stratford Festival review: Romeo and Juliet stays afloat with a handful of strong performances (2024)

Romeo and Juliet, you crazy kids!

Article content

One of the most hotly anticipated premieres of this year’s Stratford Festival, Sam White’s production of Romeo and Juliet is exactly as angst-addled as you might expect from a story that, over time, has become synonymous with teenage infatuation. Sword fights? Yep. Juicy make-out sessions? For sure. Crying, and lots of it? You betcha.

It’s an efficient, fairly traditional take on Shakespeare’s most famous play — the men don tights, the women wear empire-waist gowns and gilded headpieces. Unlike Seana McKenna’s Twelfth Night, which McKenna has updated to the year 1967, there’s no doubting that White’s Romeo and Juliet is set squarely in the Elizabethan era, complete with the time period’s jarringly positive attitudes toward child marriage and teen pregnancy.

Article content

White has taken crucial steps to remind us that Romeo and Juliet, ardent lovers though they are, are children. Vanessa Sears, luminous and vibrant as the play’s ingenue, imbues 13-year-old Juliet with a high-pitched, girlish voice, while Jonathan Mason plies his Romeo with boisterous, testosterone-fuelled impulsiveness and folly. Together, Sears and Mason are endlessly watchable, particularly after intermission, when they get the chance to lean into the high stakes of their doomed love affair.

The kids aren’t all right, it turns out, and in Romeo and Juliet, the adults might be to blame for the bloodshed incurred by Verona’s hottest situationship. Juliet’s parents (a knockout Jessica B. Hill and Graham Abbey, both at the top of their game here) are so desperate to get their daughter married off that they scarcely seem to notice how addled she’s become by love for someone who’s decidedly not the husband chosen for her by her family. Juliet’s nurse, too (a terrific Glynis Ranney) pours accelerant on the fire of her lady’s desire, helping her enact the plan that will result in the deaths of no fewer than four people.

Article content

On the Montague side, we get a pleasant few scenes with Romeo’s posse of friends before they, uh, vacate the stage. 郝邦宇 Steven Hao and Andrew Iles are decisive as Benvolio and Mercutio, backing up their pal Romeo with bravery and bite. (Iles re-appears onstage as another character in the second half, marking one of White’s more interesting directorial choices.) Scott Wentworth is a fabulous Friar Laurence, often stealing scenes with his assured handling of Shakespeare’s text and pacing.

All in, it’s a fine production dotted with great performances. Some of White’s choices seem a touch under-developed — when stars appear on the Festival Theatre ceiling and walls, for instance, they’re so faint they’re almost imperceptible. In a play about infamously star-crossed lovers, that feels like a misstep, particularly given that Louise Guinand’s lighting design is otherwise quite utilitarian. Sue LePage’s costumes are lovely and luxe (especially the exquisite golden masks sported during the party where Romeo and Juliet meet), and her sparse set gets the job done, ably suggesting everything from Juliet’s bedroom to her final crypt.

Article content

I found myself missing visual cues of the feud between the Capulets and Montagues — symbols of the conflict beyond the green-blue Montague costumes and peach-red Capulet gowns. This is a generations-old, blistering conflict that, by its end, has stolen the lives of children and adults alike: I’d have been interested to see that conflict physicalized in the transitions between scenes rather than solely demonstrated as prescribed by Shakespeare.

White’s strongest directorial flourish involves the presence of two percussionists (Jasmine Jones-Ball and Graham Hargrove) whenever something dramatic’s about to go down. Jones-Ball and Hargrove are skilled drummers who navigate their instruments with sublime dramatic flair, and their drumbeats add a spooky, unsettling heartbeat to a story with an otherwise slender aural landscape (sound design and composition are by Debashis Sinha).

If this is your first Romeo and Juliet, great! It’s not a bad production, and for newer entrants to Shakespeare’s canon, it’s a fine introduction to the language and its quirks. For more seasoned theatre-goers, the thrill of this production will come from the performers, particularly on the Capulet side of English theatre’s most sweltering tragedy.

Romeo and Juliet runs in repertory at the Festival Theatre until Oct. 26.

Article content