‘ROMEO AND JULIET’
Certainly, there’s some tragic resonance to lovers divided by their warring families, but the whole story exudes rashness and teenage hormones. Romeo is head over heels in love with someone else until he sees Juliet and forgets all about the woman he was moaning over a minute ago. Both Romeo and Juliet have a disturbing tendency to threaten suicide at the drop of a hat. None of it bodes well for a happy ending.
As one of William Shakespeare’s best known plays, it’s a fine choice for San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s annual Free Shakespeare in the Park show, performed outdoors all summer in Pleasanton, Cupertino, Redwood City and San Francisco.
Lauren Spencer and Carl Holvick capture the wild impetuousness of these two crazy kids with sweet sincerity, full of the giddy excitement of a new romance and inconsolably upset when circumstances separate them.
David E. Moore makes an unusually sympathetic Mercutio, Romeo’s bawdy buddy, giving the interminably nonsensical “Queen ByWilliam Shakespeare, presented by San Francisco Shakespeare Festival Through: Sept. 27 When & Where: Playing through July 12 at Pleasanton’s Amador Valley Community Park, then moving to parks in Cupertino, Redwood City and San Francisco Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes, one intermission Tickets: Free; www.sfshakes.org Mab” speech some added oomph with a hint of bipolar disorder amid the boisterous mockery. Gwen Loeb enlivens every scene she’s in as Juliet’s hilariously garrulous Nurse, with an infectious, irrepressible laugh. In addition to directing the swashbuckling fight scenes, Carla Pantoja plays a fiendishly fierce Tybalt with a Mephistophelean goatee, ever eager to clash swords with a Montague.
Artistic director Rebecca J. Ennals gives the play a fast-paced staging with plenty of traditional trappings. The period costumes by Ashley Holvick are colorcoded to show allegiance to either the Capulet or Montague family, making a scene in which Romeo visits an enemy dance party disguised in only a mask amusingly implausible.
The dialogue is spoken with a slight emphasis on the rhymes without making it distractingly singsong. There’s some judicious use of original pronunciation to restore some rhymes that wouldn’t work in modern English (“remedy” and “die,” for instance). Another Elizabethan period detail that’s a bit jarring nowadays is that after the somber, tragic ending, everyone does a jolly dance for the curtain call.
There are a few touches that are more distracting than effective, such as cacophonous ensemble repetitions of the opening and closing speeches, but Ennals’ staging captures both the humor and the sadness of the story nicely. One consequence of the brisk pace is that when the tragic end comes, there’s something comical about it. The lovers leap into romance so quickly that if you blink, they may be kissing before you realize they’ve met, and their downfall likewise happens so quickly that it seems inevitable, no matter how convoluted was the avalanche of rash decisions that brought them there. They seem like nice kids, but it was never going to work out for them.
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/ shurwitt.