This afternoon I picked up Bob and Blanca and we went over into the city to see the African-American Shakespeare Company’s production of Romeo and Juliet. This will certainly be my last Shakespeare play for this year. I had a little trepidation after last year’s production of The Tempest, but I kept an open mind.
Again, the staging was extremely minimal, the primary element of which was a balcony-like piece that could be rotated around for various uses, and at various times a bed and bench. But that wasn’t really an issue. Some nice aspects of the production were that they used very young actors (high school) to play the young leads. It also gave full speeches to secondary parts, which are often edited out. 
They also kept in the language that emphasized the rhyming poetic nature of the words. The downside of using such young actors was they really weren’t up to delivering the Shakespearean lines; but amazingly they did remember all their complicated lines quite well; they just lacked the maturity to understand the meaning of all the words as they delivered them. I could pick on a lot of little things, like ultimately distracting 70s background music, and seemingly out of context pictures projected up on the back of the stage, but ultimately it came together well. And the final post-climax scene was quite moving. I always love a good Romeo and Juliet, and this one, while not great, was enjoyable.
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