Northern Stage Presents Romeo and Juliet 9/28-10/23

Romeo and Juliet-the timeless story of passion, intrigue and generational discord-opens the landmark 15th Season of professional theater at Northern Stage in White River Junction, VT.

A stellar cast-including returning Northern Stage favorites SUTTON CRAWFORD (The Rainmaker, Amadeus) and Kevin David Thomas (Les Misérables, The Glass Menagerie) in the lead roles-will be led by talented young London director Oscar Blustin. Using the beauty of Shakespeare's language, the production includes special visual elements that will make this tale come alive on the intimate stage of the Briggs Opera House.

Romeo and Juliet is, at its heart, a play about two young people who care more about feeling alive than being alive, and do this with a passion, a determination, and a strength of will we seldom find matched in theater. We also see parents concerned about a disobedient daughter or a wayward son, friends fighting to defend family honor, and a religious man escalating a quarrel he meant so earnestly to end. The thrill of first-meetings, first-kisses, first-nights spent together. Exciting sword fights-more than any Shakespeare play except one-punctuate the story. Most of all, we see Shakespeare's immortal genius create a world so completely human, heart-wrenchingly familiar, and brutally moving.

Romeo and Juliet runs live on stage at the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction from September 28 - October 23, 2011. Performances are Tuesdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 5:00 p.m., except for the Opening Night performance on Friday, Sept. 30 at 7:00 p.m., with 2:00 p.m. matinees on Thursday, Oct. 6 and Saturday, Oct. 8. For tickets and information, call 802-296-7000. Tickets are also available through the Northern Stage website, www.northernstage.org.

Under the hot Mediterranean sun, Romeo Montague's love for Rosaline disappears when he glimpses Juliet Capulet at a party. Utterly smitten, he risks his safety-a blood feud between the families makes him a marked man there-by stealing onto the Capulet estate to woo her. The two agree to escape together to be married by Friar Lawrence. Her enraged parents insist that she marry the family-favored Paris; the Friar's plot to help her escape from the arranged marriage goes awry, and tragedy results.

Thomas and Crawford are joined by several past Northern Stage actors returning to celebrate the company's 15th Anniversary, including Catherine Doherty (The Wizard of Oz, Parallel Lives, Dancing At Lughnasa), London West End star Richard Hollis (The Real Thing, Amadeus), Joe Tapper (The Rainmaker), Broadway veteran Bill Kux (Resurrection Blues), Kate Levy (How the Other Half Loves) and Andrew Pandaleon (The History Boys). Upper Valley youngster Cormac Coyle joins the mainstage company for the first time after starring in several Family Theater Series Productions at Northern Stage.

The Director's Take
Unlike many of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, the world of Romeo and Juliet is not doomed from the outset. Besides the feuding Montague and Capulet families, and Romeo's unrequited love for a girl named Rosaline (whom we never meet), all is right with the world - no ghosts haunt Verona's streets, no witches appear to tempt us toward our ambitions - in fact, it is simply a cascading series of coincidental meetings that pull this story from comedy to tragedy. In the intense Mediterranean heat of this city named Verona (based in almost no way on the actual Italian city), tensions are amplified, slights become grudges, ideas turn into obsessions, and a group of young, impassioned friends find themselves torn apart doing nothing other than obeying their hearts' desires.

In this unique production, the expanded thrust stage brings the action right into our laps, reminding us that Shakespeare's genius for accessing the deepest parts of the human psyche remains as modern, as relevant, and as affecting as ever. Rather than showing us a perfect portrait of two young lovers, Shakespeare gives us something even more special - it is these lovers' imperfections that bring them together, it is their imperfections that make them so thoroughly human, and it is these same imperfections that have kept Romeo and Juliet so vividly alive as they stumble clumsily into each others' arms.

However, this is not solely a play about lovers. We see parents incensed by a disobedient daughter or concerned over a wayward son, friends fighting to defend their family's honor, and a religious man escalating a quarrel he meant so earnestly to end. We witness scenes of childish rebellion, of all-consuming passion; the thrill of first-meetings, first-kisses, first-nights spent together. We feel time slow as Juliet waits for her Romeo and time quicken as we race toward the Capulets' eerie tomb, but most of all, with each new character and each relationship we see Shakespeare's immortal genius create a world so completely human, heart-wrenchingly familiar, and brutally moving.

About the Play
Romeo and Juliet, a play about two young lovers, was written by a relatively young playwright who was just demonstrating his consummate skill. The play was believed to have been written between 1591 and 1595 and was first published in a poor-quality quarto edition in 1597, when Shakespeare was 33 years old. The play demonstrates the playwright's skill at combining comedy and tragedy, as well as his facility with subplots and his ability to show the way characters develop over the course of the play.

Shakespeare shared with his contemporaries a fondness for adapting Italian novelles, and Romeo and Juliet may have been inspired by a story called "The goodly History of the true and constant love of Rhomeo and Julietta" published in a 1567 collection, as well as Arthur Brooke's "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet," which in turn comes from Matteo Bandello's "Giuletta e Romeo," and so on. The 1597 quarto indicates that the play "hath been often (and with great applause) plaid publiquely." Future productions were often adapted to suit the morality of the time; in many cases, references to Rosaline were removed to emphasize the "first love" aspect and to make Romeo seem like . . . well, less of a Romeo. In other cases, the lead characters survive. A popular 17th century version moved the action from Verona to ancient Rome, renaming the leads as Marius and Lavinia (interesting in this context because our Romeo, Kevin David Thomas, played a different Marius in our production of Les Misérables). The play has spawned over 24 opera versions, as well as at least 40 film adaptations of various sorts, including the recent Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish.

Director Oscar Blustin has chosen to set this production in the 1800-1820 time period to reflect a societal change of the time; the stiff, class-based society was starting to give way to a freer, more expressive generation that prized immaculate dress and the efforts of middle-class individuals to act and appear aristocratic. This shift was personified by George Bryan "Beau" Brummel, man who was "famous for being famous," not unlike today's reality television personalities. Tradition is eschewed for a more honest and impulsive approach to life. Shakespeare almost certainly never visited Verona, where the play is set, and he is unlikely to have known much about what was then a rather unimportant city. The playwright may have chosen that locale because the Mediterranean heat amplifies the hot-blooded emotions of the characters.

The driving force in the play, according to the director, is a sense of determination and strength of will. Each of the characters embarks on a course of action that he or she believes is "right" or "good," yet the differing ideas of what is "right" or "good" produces the conflicts.

About the Director
OSCAR BLUSTIN directs a mainstage Northern Stage production for the first time, after Associate Directing on Amadeus, Hamlet, The Wizard of Oz and Greater Tuna, previously assisting on The History Boys and directing at Project Playwright 2009, where his work was awarded the Audience Choice award. A recent graduate of Durham University, UK, Blustin was the first freshman ever to be awarded the university's Best Director of the Year in 2008, and again in 2010. He also won Best Director at Durham Drama Festival 2008 and assumed Artistic Directorship of the festival in 2009 and 2010. While at Durham, Blustin directed over a dozen productions, including international touring Shakespeare plays Twelfth Night in 2009 and Macbeth in 2010, which performed Off-West End and Off-Broadway. Blustin has recently directed Richard III at London's Courtyard Theatre, as well as productions at numerous Off-West End venues, including the Leicester Square Theatre with acclaimed comedy group Kieran and the Joes.

About Northern Stage

Northern Stage now stands as one of the most prestigious and fastest-growing regional theaters in New England. Founding Artistic Director Brooke Ciardelli brought the company to the Briggs Opera House in 1997; since then, Northern Stage has offered nearly 100 productions, including World Premieres such as The Shrew Tamer, Ovid: Tales of Myth & Magic and A Christmas Carol: The Musical. Other highlights include a staged reading of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Patrick Stewart and Lisa Harrow and a reading of Resurrection Blues, with the playwright, Pulitzer Prize winner Arthur Miller, in attendance. The company has been honored with Moss Hart Awards for Excellence in Theater from the New England Theatre Conference five times, for productions of To Kill A Mockingbird (1999), All My Sons (2004), Les Misérables (2008), Hamlet (2009) and Amadeus (2010), as well as an Addison Award for The Shrew Tamer (2004) and 2010 Owl Awards for Best Actress and Best Musical and 2011 awards for Best Comedy Theater and Best Artistic Director.

Community support has enabled the company to sell over 35,000 tickets in downtown White River Junction in the last year to enjoy entertaining and thought-provoking professional theater and theater education here at the crossroads of northern New England. They have also reached out to offer residencies and workshops at over a dozen area schools; initiated "Project Playwright," a literacy program for fifth and sixth graders; and conducted a statewide literacy program, The Big Read, under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Arts.

For information or tickets, call 802-296-7000, e-mail boxoffice@northernstage.org, or log on to www.northernstage.org. The Box Office at the Briggs Opera House is open beginning two hours before all performances; tickets for all shows are available by phone or at the Northern Stage administrative office at 76 Gates Street, White River Junction, Monday-Friday from 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.