Word: juliets
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...M.I.T. grad. Lauren (Diane Lane), the stepdaughter of an overseas American corporate executive, reads Heidegger for kicks. These two meet, go steady, then flee their meddling parents by traveling by train with Olivier from Paris to Venice. Hokey as it seems, this film's Romeo and Juliet want to pledge their eternal love by kissing in a gondola under the Bridge of Sighs...
...performers of the title roles in the production of Romeo and Juliet at the Hasty Pudding Theater devote their energies to making noises, but they're not Shakespeare's. Walter C. Hughes's Romeo has good looks but no ear for the verse in the play, so he sobs a lot. Shannon Gaughan's Juliet is only slightly better; she varies the noises emanating from the stage by introducing several whines. They do this production in Shirley Wilber as Juliet's nurse seems to be the only performer with some sense of how to present this play. Romeo and Juliet...
Romeo and Juliet is too familiar and capricious a story for actors to rely on the plot alone. They must embody Shakespeare's fascination with the lunatic, the lover, and the poet,' and when they cannot, the play falls from masterpiece to warhorse, from tragedy to farce...
Only a couple of performances rise above the standard set by the leads. Shirley Wilber's embodiment of Juliet's Nurse seems on another plane from everything else in this production: smooth and completely in control of every nuance of Shakespeare's verse. Her discovery of Juliet's feigned death is the only moment of convincing grief in the whole show...
...scene in this production succeeds quite well, and also points up the disaster in the rest. When the Capulets discover Juliet apparently dead in her chamber, they explode in a satirical outpouring off grief that Shakespeare wrote to mock the traditional, over-formal conventions of Elizabethan tragedy. Mother and Father Capulet vie in the extravagance of their laments; lines like "life and these lips have long been separated" signal to the audience that this is farce, not tragedy. The cast at the Hasty Pudding conveys the full comedy of this scene. Unfortunately, the comic atmosphere lingers like an unwanted guest...