Romeo and Juliet
2014: Don Roy King, David Leveaux
I should admit my biases. I expected not to like this version of Romeo and Juliet. As a long-time Tolkien fan, I found Orlando Bloom’s portrayal of Legolas annoying (though that may have more to do with direction than his own performance), and I also have the visceral sense that any Shakespeare production that highlights motorcycles is probably more dedicated to admiring its own clever transposition than to exposing the core of the play itself. Nevertheless, it took only a few minutes before at least those objections were dismissed. Others arose in the course of my viewing.
Though he is, as most critics noted, too old for the part, really, Bloom’s Romeo is reasonably engaging — neither simplistic nor excessively cynical. But perhaps the real focal point of the film — both its virtue and its limitation — is Condola Rashad’s portrayal of Juliet. She is able to bring to this rather overworked role an enormous freshness that I found immediately engaging, with a combination of naivete together with the verbal dexterity and intelligence that also distinguish Juliet. A number of reviewers found her performance less convincing: they wanted more subtlety and apparent skepticism. Others thought that she lacked variety in her delivery of Shakespeare’s lines. I didn’t find the latter to be a problem: to my ear, her delivery is fairly naturalistic and projects the intelligence limited by her naivete. From my perspective that works: it seems to me that if Juliet were a deeper thinker, or at least a warier person, she would not have allowed herself to get into the situation she finds herself in. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.
Between them, Bloom and Rashad seem to me to achieve relatively little chemistry. That’s inevitably a subjective call, and others might find the experience different. General audiences seem to have enjoyed this better than most of the critics.
One interesting feature of this production — of which I have seen relatively little overt discussion — is the fact that the Capulets are all black, while the Montagues are all white. Whether this is intended to set up some kind of implicit subtext in the play about race relations is perhaps going to depend on how you watch it. If it’s saying anything on that axis, I’m not sure what it’s saying, and nobody else seemed to have any idea either. It is suggestive, perhaps, but ultimately leads to nothing. Certainly the conflict between the two houses is not racially defined in the original play.
This is probably not the only version to see, for its various limitations, but, on exactly the same grounds, it bears comparison with others.
Abraham: Spencer Plachy
Balthasar: Joe Carroll
Benvolio: Conrad Kemp
Citizen of Verona: Carolyn Michelle Smith
Citizen of Verona: Don Guillory
Citizen of Verona: Nance Williamson
Friar John: Thomas Schall
Friar Laurence: Brent Carver
Gregory: Maurice Jones
Juliet’s Servant: Sheria Irving
Juliet: Condola Rashad
Lady Capulet: Roslyn Ruff
Lady Montague: Tracy Sallows
Lord Capulet: Chuck Cooper
Mercutio: Christian Camargo
Musician: David Van Tieghem
Musician: Tahirah Whittington
Nurse: Jayne Houdyshell
Paris: Justin Guarini
Prince Escalus: Geoffrey Owens
Romeo: Orlando Bloom
Sampson: Donté Bonner
Tybalt: Corey Hawkins
Understudy: Eric Loscheider
Watch Romeo and Juliet on streaming video from Amazon