Word: romeos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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West Side Story (at the Gary, LI 2-7040) rumbles on for another week of color, action, and Bernstein music. It is said the Old Vic production of Romeo and Juliet studied this film in an effort to improve its own staging. What more can be said...
Reverse Adaptation. Most notable is Romeo and Juliet. Curiously enough, it has been directed by a young Italian, Franco Zeffirelli, who also designed the superb, dusty-streets-and-bright-sunlight Veronese sets. Over the years, productions of the play have steadily stiffened and solidified; the blood has gone out of the sword battles, and even the most passionate of declamations have gradually become dry word arias in a static opera without music. Zeffirelli has changed that. His direction is fresh and fluid despite the inherent difficulties in a play that begins in the stars then plods to an absurd conclusion...
...Romeo (John Stride) jumps and pants in reckless adolescence. His Juliet (Joanna Dunham) is the giddy, giggling, starry-eyed and breathless hoyden she ought to be. This is, after all, not an impulsive love between maturing young adults but a doomed one between hapless children. "These violent delights have violent ends," observes Friar Laurence...
Zeffirelli makes them exuberantly violent. When Romeo and Tybalt square off for battle, they crouch like street fighters, foils in one hand, poniards in the other. None of that crossed-swords jazz. This is a rumble, man. In the turnabout of dramatic history, Romeo and Juliet has become, in a sense, an adaptation of West Side Story. It is probably one of the best productions ever given the play...
...paralyzed, tableau style of Douglas Scale's direction. In the end, Saint Joan is the least remarkable of the Old Vic's productions, but it is paradoxically the outstanding one of the lot. For Shakespeare's poetry cannot fully conceal the gaping flaws in Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. Saint Joan is, in purely dramatic terms, the best of the three plays...