Romeo And Juliet
Playwright: William Shakespeare
At: Chicago Shakespeare Theatre at Navy Pier, 800 East Grand Avenue
Phone: (312) 595-5600; $42-$65
Runs through: June 19
Mark Lamos shares some of the credit—after all, he’s the director who hired her—but the responsibility for making this the most aurally dazzling production in the history of Shakes-at-the-Pier lies with vocal coach Christine Adaire. Only moments after we’d resigned ourselves to another evening of schoolroom caesuras inserted at the script’s right-hand margins, our teenage lovers survey their universe from Capulet’s moonlit orchard and proceed to declare their intentions in LONG, resounding sentences brimming with operatic gusto and passionate resolution.
If Adaire’s attentions allow the characters to articulate their thoughts with lung-power to spare, Michael Yeargan’s skeletal set likewise gives them room for visual expression. Never were fortunes thwarted by a more obstructive world than this where Juliet’s balcony is so high that she and her swain must pledge their secret troth with kisses cast at one another through the air. And never was Verona’s summer heat more vividly conveyed than in a town square where young slackers mop their faces and initiate swordplay in wide, lazy passes designed as much to raise a breeze as to scare opponents.
These factors facilitate a refreshingly uncluttered version of the familiar tale. Extensive edits in the text make for an unhurried pace that allows us to note details too often ignored in most productions—Friar Lawrence’s motive in helping the fugitive couple elope, for example, and his appearance at the scene of Juliet’s sham suicide to dispose of the telltale vial—a gesture so downright logical that fans of police procedurals laughed on opening night in very recognition of its common sense. And while the possibility that Mercutio might be gay is now old gossip, who before would have suspected Lord Capulet of domestic abuse?
This candor serves to provide relief from the dramatic tension without resort to the bawdy jokes so often employed for that purpose. Playing its chief proponents, Mike Nussbaum and Rondi Reed, actors long accustomed to commanding their environment from the get-go, lend Friar Lawrence and the Nurse so much matter-of-fact presence that we look to them, as we look to the news analysts, for explanation of the events engendered by citizens driven to extravagant measures in an unjust society.