Word: romeos
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
That would be a mistake in any play of Shakespeare's, but Romeo and Juliet suffers cruelly. Shakespeare frolics in the verbal exuberance of his youth in each of the play's celebrated passages. Like Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech, Romeo and Juliet studies insubstantiality, considering love as the product of words, not acts. After all, there isn't much in the plot to convince an audience of the worth of the love between Romeo and Juliet: a kiss at a masked ball, a nighttime encounter, a secret marriage, and one night together are its only substance...
...power is extraordinary, as when it switches from the prevalent formal diction to simple, direct monosyllables in the Act II meeting between the two lovers--so straightforward that its language has become a model for greeting cards and sentimental wallposters. Shakespeare never lets us doubt that the love of Romeo and Juliet is the offspring not of their hearts but of their dreams, their words...
...Romeo sounds this note in his very first speech with the cry of "O any thing, of nothing first create." Characteristically, Walter C. Hughes's Romeo swallows the line...
...blame for the failure of this Romeo and Juliet must lie at the feet of Hughes and Shannon Gaughan as Juliet. Neither goes beyond the broad label of 'youth' to find some more specific trait in their characters to highlight; neither is terribly graceful on stage; and both annoyingly exploit some vocal and some non-verbal mannerisms...