"Romeo and Juliet" at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

OSF photo by Jenny Graham

I really wanted to like this production. The last time OSF staged Romeo and Juliet, it was outstanding, with the title characters portrayed by a really talented couple we'd never seen before, but have since seen and appreciated often. And this time, they had a Bay Area actor I like cast as Romeo, so I had high hopes. Let's just say for now that they weren't realized.

The Play

Seriously? You want me to summarize Romeo and Juliet? Fine: two kids whose families are feuding fall madly in love, get secretly married, but get separated when he kills one of her relatives. Following bad advice from a clergyman, they both end up dead. Some other stuff happens, too. And there are some funny bits earlier, especially with the nurse.

The Production

I was very pleased when I saw that William Hodgson had been cast as Romeo. I've seen him in a number of productions here in the Bay Area, and he has impressed me. Emily Ota as Juliet is rather unknown to me, as I guess she'd been in a minor role in last season's Merry Wives. But in the performance we saw, there was no chemistry between them, and further, they were both acting way too old for the roles. Juliet is supposed to be just shy of her 14th birthday, and Romeo about 15-16. Neither one of them was convincing a that. Neither showed the giddiness of adolescents falling in love. Juliet looked more like Romeo's aunt than his girlfriend, which suggests both costuming and acting issues.

We subsequently saw both of the lead actors in other roles (Ota in Sense and Sensibility, Hodgson in Love's Labours Lost), and they were fine, really good, actually. Ota as Marianne Dashwood was a much more convincing naive teen than she was as Juliet. And Hodgson was the actor I know and expect in LLL. So I can only attribute the deficiency to poor direction on the part of director Damaso Rodriguez--a conclusion bolstered by other evidence as well.

For example, the Nurse (Robin Goodrin Nordli) is a well-known comical role in this rather slow-developing tragedy. And Nordli is a very experienced OSF cast member. But she played the almost exclusively for laughs, missing most of the necessary emotional connection with Juliet that makes the latter part of the play make sense. Similarly, Sara Bruner's comic rendition of Mercutio suggests that she watched last season's production of Shakespeare in Love and believed the part about the play actually being called "Mercutio." Because Bruner is also experienced and familiar, this over-the-top, broadly comic portrayal has to be intentional, but it really doesn't fit the play overall. And finally, Friar Laurence (Michael J. Hume) is played as a clueless, befuddled goofball. When he suddenly concocts an elaborate scheme to save the day (with tragic results), it makes no sense either that he comes up with it or that anyone would go along with it.

In short, after playing up the comic bits early, there is almost nothing to fall back on when things turn dark. We haven't established the emotional connections necessary to make the tragic turns work. There is no way to blame the actors for this. Nordli and Hume combined have a half century of experience just at Ashland. I know how they act and fit into a cast, and there's no way they'd go this far off the reservation. It had to be directed.

Bottom Line

I have no idea what director Rodriguez thought he was doing with this show. Making the start a big, broad comedy is fun for a while, but leaves no path available to the tragic end. And the whole driver of the plot is supposed to be the unquenchable teen love of the two main characters, but we just don't see or feel that at all.

So as hard as it is to fathom, this production manages to take what may be the best known tragic love story of all time and turn it into an incoherent mess. There are some "good" performances here by the actors, but most of it is wasted on this mess. I guess if you're looking for a quick comedy you could watch the first half and leave at the intermission. But if you're expecting a tear-jerking tragedy, you will be disappointed. Lots of dry eyes at the end of this show. It's a real waste of the time and talent put into the production.

Ashland rarely produces a poor play, but this is arguably the poorest I've seen in the decade I've been attending. Go see something else. R&J will be back in a few years, hopefully with better results.