Word: mercutio
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Equally impressive is John McEnery, 25, who plays Mercutio not as a witty, lascivious buffoon but as a possessed genius who has lounged too long with his inferiors. His delivery of the Queen Mab speech is a masterpiece of abstracted art. Teetering on madness, he spouts the words as if emerging from a lifelong nightmare. Zeffirelli, however, seems to have had better luck in casting youth than age. Pat Heywood's Nurse is a cockney caricature. And Milo O'Shea's Friar Laurence is a characterization lost somewhere in the middle distance, not deeply enough involved with...
...Avon. After seeing Zeffirelli's Broadway production of The Lady of the Camellias, TIME's critic called him "a director who needs a director." Even the movie of Romeo and Juliet will not please everybody, since it clearly reflects Zeffirelli's idiosyncratic opinions of Shakespeare. "Mercutio," he insists, "is a self-portrait of Shakespeare himself, and a homosexual...
...rest of the cast, except for Martin Andrucki and Sheila Hart, isn't worth mentioning. He interpreted Mercutio as a flit and she-with another director might have been an okay Nurse. Frank Hartenstein's set was a split-level bungalow that converted into a shower...
Before Nureyev defected to England, the Royal Ballet's lead was David Blair, and in one scene the two men dance together. The comparison is as illumiinating as it is cruel. Because he plays Mercutio, poor Blair has to keep smiling throughout. Not that Blair is bad. He dances with great control if a little stiffly. Then Nureyev comes along, with calves like artillery shells, and he is about as stiff as a bursting rocket. He doesn't have to leap to be amazing, he just has to move...
...inch the teenage Juliet, brimming with the dart and dash of adolescence. She began by cavorting kittenishly with a rag doll, then movingly matured into a woman in the throes of first love. Backed by sumptuous sets and costumes and an excellent supporting cast, most notably David Blair as Mercutio, Nureyev and Fonteyn were awarded 35 minutes of curtain calls...