Jonathan Mason and Vanessa Sears star in Stratford's 2024 production of Romeo and Juliet.David Hou/Stratford Festival
- Title: Romeo and Juliet
- Written by: William Shakespeare
- Director: Sam White
- Actors: Jonathan Mason, Vanessa Sears
- Company: Stratford Festival
- Venue: Festival Theatre
- City: Stratford, Ont.
- Year: To Oct. 26, 2024
“Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.” This is one of the sage-sounding old saws Friar Lawrence delivers in Romeo and Juliet, which is back on stage at Stratford Festival just three years after its last appearance at the Ontario repertory company.
This holy man of Verona’s advice is something, like his potions, young people should think twice about before swallowing. Thankfully, director Sam White does not heed his counsel on the subject of speed.
White’s new staging at Stratford shows there is some wisdom in whizzing your way through a Shakespeare tragedy.
Its first half sees characters sprinting on and off the Festival Theatre’s thrust stage, sometimes talking over each other – giving a sense of momentum to this well-worn story of star-crossed young lovers from the warring houses of Montague and Capulet.
To help keep the energy up and audience awake, White has duelling percussionists (Graham Hargrove and Jasmine Jones-Ball) drum their way across the stage every few scenes, too.
These drummers’ first appearance comes in accompanying Vanessa Sears, who is playing Juliet, as she sings the prologue a cappella.
Sears, who has won Dora Mavor Moore Awards for her performances in both plays and musicals in Toronto, is having her first fully Shakespearean season at Stratford but that does not mean she is keeping her musical talents muted.
When first glimpsed by Romeo at the Capulet ball, her Juliet is singing a little Italian opera, as well.
Her lovely voice makes it easy to understand why Romeo (Jonathan Mason) falls in love with her at first sound. At first sight is always a stretch, given they’re at a masked party.
The two subsequently make a sweet pair in the balcony scene, which feels like it arrives more swiftly than usual.
Another side effect of White’s production’s uptempo is that Mercutio seems to take up less space than usual as played by a geeky Andrew Iles; I’m used to actors making a swashbuckling smorgasbord out of the character’s Queen Mab speech, so it was interesting to hear it delivered as the strange but more subdued prattle of a fantasy nerd who has trouble reading social cues.
Mercutio’s eventual death feels like less of a loss to the play than it usually does, and only a loss for the characters. That means Iles’s is a performance that serves the storytelling first and foremost.
This Romeo and Juliet is very much for theatregoers who enjoy Shakespeare stripped down to its essence on a nearly bare stage.David Hou/Stratford Festival
The same is true of many others, such as Glynis Ranney’s as Juliet’s nurse. This character’s monologues can walk a fine line between showing that she has a tendency to go on, and actually going on too long – but there no such concern here in Ranney’s spry, silver-tongued rendition.
This Romeo and Juliet is very much for theatregoers who enjoy Shakespeare stripped down to its essence on a nearly bare stage, plus period costumes (the tights and codpieces are courtesy of designer Sue LePage).
Sword fights aside, the language is the thing. The two strongest performances in this department come from the actors playing Juliet’s parents.
As the dad, Graham Abbey really does a fine job of showing how the worst tyrannical behaviour can come from men who believe themselves to be good, especially when they feel their generosity has been rejected.
As Juliet’s mom, Jessica B. Hill paints a highly complex portrait of the character – cowed by her husband, distant from her daughter, traumatized by some combination of her early marriage and loss of other children, but unable to stop a negative cycle from continuing.
The layers in Abbey and Hill’s performances are less apparent elsewhere – and, language-wise, a few of the cast do stumble, running their mouths off fast.
I found Sears’s performance to be one that could have most benefited from her taking a little more time with her words as the play turns down its inevitable tragic trajectory. Her delivery of lines when Juliet is in distress had a high singsong quality to them that grew repetitive.
To be fair, Romeo and Juliet has structural problems that always make it become a little tiring down its final stretch – without strong directorial interventions anyway, which this production does not have. This play regularly has a “traditional” feel when mounted on the Festival stage.
In a program note, archivist Stephanie Vaillant writes, “Contrary to popular belief, Romeo and Juliet is neither the most frequently performed play at the Stratford Festival, nor was it one of our earliest performances.”
This read a bit defensive to me. R&J is tied for the second-most produced play at Stratford (just one less than A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and it leads in number of productions at Stratford this century.
Indeed, there have been three Romeo and Juliets in the last seven seasons; like the play’s final scene, that can feel like overkill to a seasoned Stratford-goer – though, obviously, there always a fresh supply of Grade 9s to be bussed in.