Review: ‘Romeo & Juliet’ Find Too Little Love in the Park
5 / 10
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.
