Lorin Wertheimer — Theater Critic

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?

If a musical about bohemian artist characters with revolutionary ideals who believe their art will bring about change sounds familiar, it might be because New York Theatre Workshop’s 1996 smash Rent plays with the same themes. But unlike the La bohème-inspired artists of Jonathan Larson’s magnum opus, the college-age Egyptians here have something tangible to rebel against. And that is both downfall and saving grace of this meandering, frustrating, messy, and sometimes great musical.