Like the pangs of romance or the pull of melodrama, adolescent angst proves timeless. Sam Gold, the director of a newly revived Romeo + Juliet on Broadway, knows this – the production, an admirably diverse, comfortably queer and aggressively zillennial version featuring original music from the pop maestro Jack Antonoff, leans hard into the text’s hot-blooded, definitively teenage impulsivity. But he doesn’t seem to trust it. Romeo + Juliet, so styled after the 1996 Baz Luhrmann film with which it shares an ultra-contemporary, lusty ethos, feels from the jump overeager to assure today’s youths that the stir-crazy teens of Verona were just like them – stressed, pressed and bursting at the seams with feeling, as told by a Netflix heartthrob (Heartstopper’s Kit Connor) and a Spielberg leading lady (West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler), both in their Broadway debuts.
Fresh off his critically acclaimed spin on Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People this spring, Gold has returned to the Circle in the Square Theatre, this time energetically styled as a cross between a cutesy arcade (stuffed teddy bears abound) and a Brooklyn rave. As viewers take their seats, the cast, dressed somewhere within the Venn diagram of Bushwick (bustiers, baggy shorts, crop tops) and Netflix high school drama (shark onesie, intense bisexual lighting) rove about the fittingly loose stage — the round, the stairs, the rafters. (Scenic design by the recently prolific collective dots, costume design by Enver Chakartash.) They grind, grope, vape, caress with the hungry, supple movements of youth, the limb tangles of a basement party.
The effect of Shakespeare, but bumpin’ that, can be mesmerizing, such as when Gabby Beans, as the actor playing Mercutio, the friar and the prince, introduces the other actors via hand mic and hypebeast-y cheering, all staccato movements and bravado. More often than not, it irks, like an overly enthusiastic theater teacher straining to get equally enthusiastic kids interested in the classics by whatever means necessary, be it overt eroticism, Doc Martens, a couple of mid original pop songs by Antonoff, or the jarring presence of the TikTok binge drinking phenomenon known as a Borg (Blackout Rage Gallon).
In contrast from the overly dour and minimalist rendition starring fellow Brit crush Tom Holland on the West End this summer, Gold’s Romeo + Juliet, like Luhrmann’s, errs on the side of maximalism: glitter, throbbing synth beats, strobe lights, all characters frequently yelling or, at least, always in motion. Some of the decisions feel recklessly, rebelliously unserious, such as a fourth-wall break to sing the former Antonoff band Fun’s We Are Young, by the comic standout Gían Pérez, who plays Samson, Paris and Peter.
The mostly by-the-book production (with text consultations by the Shakespeare scholars Michael Sexton and Ayanna Thompson) strains, and sometimes succeeds, to wring whatever humor and horniness exists in this tale of woe – the frequent jostling (movement direction by Sonya Tayeh, with violence coordinated by Drew Leary) always toeing the line of erotic (and sometimes giving way to outright titillation); the actors (with the exception of Connor and Zegler) each playing multiple roles, with often murky delineation and a refreshingly modern fluidity of gender. When Connor’s chiseled, dissembling Romeo lunges at Juliet’s balcony (a minimalist, overhanging twin bed), he does a pull-up to kiss her. Cue wolf-whistles.
It is all, as one can probably imagine, a lot, at once disarming and confusing. And held together, to the extent that it is, by the remarkable performances of its star-crossed lovers. The waifish, doe-like Zegler, who broke through as a deceptively steely ingenue in Spielberg’s West Side Story, stumbles over some iambic pentameter but maintains a lambent, increasingly urgent inner spark, especially as she rebukes her parents (both played with relish by Sola Fadiran).
Connor, who excelled at tentative sensitivity in Heartstopper, plays Romeo with amiable laddishness, more soft-hearted, hot-blooded brawn than underdeveloped brain. He is the only cast member who demonstrated a natural grasp on the tricky rhythm of Shakespeare; I palpably relaxed whenever he began to speak, so much better does the dialogue sound from his mouth: intentional, loaded, somewhere never obtuse. For everyone else, the line delivery was spotty: a zinger here, a quip there, and plenty of throwaways to get through performances that were just as much pacing, stomping, strutting and preening and speaking, particularly in the case of Tommy Dorfman’s nurse/Tybalt and Beans’s overdone Mercutio, drawling in a distractingly low, grating octave.
Though to be fair, intense over-acting may be for the sake of the crowd, for whom Shakespeare remains a dense and daunting endeavor (“I have soooo much algebra tonight,” said a girl behind me as I exited). In this play about teens, now vigorously pitched for teens, to Borg or not to Borg may be a pertinent question – and if it serves as an entry to a genuinely refreshing take on the oft-spoken balcony scene, then so be it.
