OMG, R&J!
Last week St. Ann’s Warehouse gave us a “Julius Caesar” that’s purportedly being put on by inmates in a women’s prison.
Now comes a Classic Stage Company production in which a bunch of college students and their adult advisers have staged “Romeo and Juliet.”
Just kidding: It may seem like a school effort, but sadly this inept, birdbrained concoction is done by professionals. So instead of one bad “Romeo and Juliet” — the Broadway show with Orlando Bloom and his motorcycle — we now have two. Talk about an embarrassment of glitches.
The lure here is Elizabeth Olsen as Juliet. She’s the youngest and — based on movies such as “Martha Marcy May Marlene” — most promising of the notorious Olsen sisters.
We’ll have to wait a bit longer to see that talent bloom, at least onstage. Olsen has an appealingly grave, sober presence, but she needs help from a strong actors’ director to channel that inner strength. Tea Alagic isn’t that director.
To make matters worse, Romeo is equally green.
The role initially went to Finn Wittrock, who played Philip Seymour Hoffman’s womanizing son in “Death of a Salesman.” But Wittrock withdrew, and his replacement, Julian Cihi, is slim of frame, wispy of whiskers and entirely devoid of presence. (William Hurt was meant to play the Friar, but he must have smelled trouble because he, too, jumped ship early on.)
Left to their own devices, Olsen and Cihi say their lines with conviction and not much else.
But then, little in the show has been thought through. Marsha Ginsberg’s bare set has nothing to help the actors ground their performances — not even a balcony. We don’t get a sense of the intense hatred between the Montagues and the Capulets, either.
The first have no clear identity, while the second seem to have escaped from the Pacino version of “Scarface.” Tybalt (Dion Mucciacito) will sear your eyeballs in his tight white pants and gold shirt open to the navel. As Juliet’s nurse, Daphne Rubin-Vega looks equally striking in a 1940s-style hairdo, and she peppers her lines with Spanish.
It’s a fun idea, but it feels gratuitous. And Rubin-Vega is often unintelligible, as is T.R. Knight, the former “Grey’s Anatomy” doc who plays Romeo’s pal Mercutio as a manic-depressive, emphasis on the manic.
Better are the older actors, notably David Garrison and Kathryn Meisle as Juliet’s parents, because they at least look as if they understand what they’re saying.
The younger ones are at sea. When those crazy Capulet and Montague kids do the Harlem Shake during their big ball, it’s hard not to be relieved: At least they’re not speaking.