Review Roundup: The Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park Production of ROMEO & JULIET

Performances are underway for The Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Romeo & Juliet, directed by Associate Artistic Director/Resident Director Saheem Ali. The production includes Spanish translations by Alfredo Michel Modenessi and choreography by Mayte Natalio. Read the reviews below!

The cast includes Ra’Mya Latiah Aikens (Juliet), Sergio Mauritz Ang (Friar John/Ensemble), Daniel Bravo Hernández (Romeo), Andrés Nicolás Chaves (Ensemble), Rachel Crowl (Apothecary/Ensemble), Reece dos Santos (Balthasar), Caleb Joshua Eberhardt (Mercutio), Jacquernst F. Filias (Ensemble), Glenn Fleshler (Lord Capulet), Francis Jue (Friar Laurence), Ariyan Kassam (Tybalt), LaChanze (Lady Capulet), Martin K. Lewis (Paris), Zack Lopez Roa (Benvolio), Gilda Mercado (Ensemble), Tina Muñoz Pandya (Ensemble), Deirdre O’Connell (Nurse), Jason Manuel Olazábal (Lord Montague), Jessica Pimentel (Escalus), Fedra Ramírez Olivares (Ensemble), Piper Runge (Ensemble), Miles Segura (Ensemble), Mariand Torres (Lady Montague), and Marlon Xavier (Ensemble).

Romeo & Juliet began performances at The Delacorte Theater in Central Park on Friday, May 22, and officially opened on Thursday, June 11. Performances will run through Sunday, June 28.

Helen Shaw, The New York Times: But the Delacorte’s huge outdoor stage needs a director more comfortable with staging action and group scenes — for “Romeo and Juliet,” in which Verona’s warring houses play a crucial role, unsteadiness in handling the ensemble is fatal. And the emotional stuff just goes thud. When Juliet awakens in her family crypt to find her young husband dying as he leans over her, for instance, we lose several of that excruciating scene’s key beats. It’s a pretty famous moment, when she stabs herself, but Ali has explicitly cut the dagger (while laboriously emphasizing it in an earlier moment). The editing of the play grows particularly slapdash, and the lines mean less and less.

Emily Chackerian, 1 Minute Critic: Unfortunately, the modern twist unnecessarily complicates and feels almost incompatible with Shakespeare’s text. There is little to the production that explains precisely why Romeo and Juliet are starcrossed, or where the animosity between their families arises from, especially because it is only Tybalt who seems to genuinely dislike Romeo.

Roma Torre, New York Stage Review: There are plenty of other reasons to be wowed by this production. I have to wonder if Oana Botez was working with some chemical enhancements when designing the masquerade costumes. They’re a deliriously freakish collection of whimsy and pagan fever-dreams. Contrasting the lavishness of those scenes, the play opens with very simple haunting imagery – three black-robed creatures wearing ram masks. It’s all that’s needed to establish a sense of doom and death.

Adam Feldman, Time Out New York: While it may not all hang together, though, this Romeo & Juliet offers much to savor. Principle among them are Deirdre O’Connell’s magnificently world-weary, knowing and bawdy Nurse and Glenn Fleshler’s commanding Lord Capulet, whose paternal tenderness in the first half makes his explosive fury in the second all the more harrowing. Caleb Joshua Eberhardt pulls off Mercutio’s long and tricky Queen Mab monologue through his force of energetic invention. Michael Thurber’s music is well-served by Francis Jue’s high-strung Friar Lawrence and LaChanze’s Real Housewives-ready Lady Capulet. Although Hernández’s Romeo is frequently overeager, the Aikens's Juliet has some very fine moments, such as in her mausoleum speech. And Oana Botez’s costumes are a delight, particularly at the colorful Capulet costume ball, and the prevalence of floral imagery—Juliet sleeps in a flower bed—evokes a beauty that is vibrant but ephemeral.

Amelia Merrill, New York Theatre Guide: Also baffling are the choice to take the intermission after Romeo and Juliet's wedding (rather than after Tybalt and Mercutio’s murders) and the music by Michael Thurber, used so sparingly that you may forget the previous tune by the time the next one rolls around. The high note of this production is the cast: Deirdre O’Connell’s acerbic Nurse, spewing fire in a lilt; LaChanze doling out motherly advice with equal parts charm and heart as Lady Capulet; the title lovers, played by Daniel Bravo Hernández and Ra’mya Latiah Aikens with an antsy giddiness that makes them appear relaxed in such loaded roles.

Lorin Wertheimer, Exeunt: It’s been years since I’ve read or seen Romeo and Juliet and the play hits middle-aged me differently than it did my younger self. Tybalt’s toxic masculinity, the older generation’s terrible parenting, and the state’s ineffectuality all seem more relevant and dangerous, while the play’s resolution, with the parents taking responsibility for their children’s tragic deaths and resolving to amend their ways, seems a suicidee’s fantasy (and indirectly endorses self-harm). In reality, when humans make mistakes we entrench, doubling down in the hope that more of the same will reverse course. What better illustration of this is there than the immigration issue, which populists have used generation after generation as a scapegoat for all social ills, and which the current administration points to as the root of all evil?

Thom Geier, Culture Sauce: One of the reasons we return to the Bard — and to any classic work — is to find the thread that make a centuries-old story relevant to today’s audiences. Ali succeeds in crafting some memorable stage images, and of depicting the challenges for youthful love to survive the prejudices of families from different backgrounds. But he goes too far by taking sides between the rival clans, making the show’s ultimate reconciliation feel less like welcome detente and more like surrender. A hollow victory indeed.

Sara Holdren, Vulture: That’s the persistent disappointment of our era of Shakespeare in the Park: Those behind the enterprise seem convinced that audiences come to see a parade of flashy costumes, backed by a visual metaphor for modern politics that’s easy to read on the surface, even if it becomes muddled the further it’s pursued. How strange that we’ve dedicated some of the country’s most prestigious stages to a writer who it seems we’re only half interested in listening to. But then, as that writer put it more than 400 years ago, “the world is still deceived with ornament.”

Charles Isherwood, The Wall Street Journal: Mr. Ali, who directed the flashy but fun “Twelfth Night” that reopened the Delacorte last year, again piles on the pageantry. At the Capulet ball where Romeo and Juliet meet, Juliet and her mother grab microphones and sing a brief duet, presumably because Lady Capulet is played by LaChanze, a musical-theater star. The costumes, by Oana Botez, are eye-delighting creations, often in neon colors and splashed with sequins. The ball patrons parade around the stage in spectacularly gaudy headdresses. Even Friar Lawrence wears a vibrantly colored woven shrug over his clerical uniform.

Average Rating: 61.1%