Timothy West, Antiques Roadshow, and Even More AI Shakespeare
Plus: *Are* The Youth F**ked?
The Youth Are F**ked
I anticipated wanting distraction last week and saw McNeal, Ainadamar, Romeo and Juliet, Tammy Faye, and Suffs between Tuesday and Saturday. Some of them were excellent and some were incredibly not.1
This Romeo and Juliet leans hard into the youths. The leads are Zoomer heartthrobs and none of the actors look above millennial-with-a-retinol-subscription age. In a play that depicts generational conflict, this flattens out the tragedy. Part of the heartbreak of that play is that an *entire generation* is wiped out. Paris, Mercutio, Tybalt, Romeo, Juliet: all dead. They are already survivors (Capulet tells us that Juliet’s siblings didn’t make it and there was that earthquake) but die young anyway because of a corrupting, bone-deep, noxious, churning hatred that their parents pass on.
These parents (Well, parent. Capulet and Lady Capulet are played by the same actor and the parents Montague are absent) look like they’ll just try again. Nothing is lost forever, nothing is broken unfixable. The overwhelming takeaway is that some kids were mean to each other and things got a little out of hand, that’s all.
Because the ensemble’s youthful attitudes (spending pre-show crushing cans of Celcius, vaping, and lounging on inflatable furniture) and costumes (camo jorts! shark onsies! Paris’ “Gift From God” t-shirt is 2/3 funny) are universal, they feel inert. This isn’t the court vs. the woods, establishment vs. upstarts, or even the old vs. the young. Juliet isn’t rebelling against her parents by wearing a mini-skirt and a crop top, she probably borrowed it from their closet.
And, this production is intentionally designed for an audience that will respond to what it looks like (and it looks good. Romeo’s fully bedazzled tracksuit is *stunning*) rather than what it says. It is meant to be seen not heard. As the director explained:
It's loud in there. And there will be audience members that say, ‘that is too loud.’ That's fine with me because I have an interest in connecting this text to this specific audience that does not think it's too loud.
This Romeo and Juliet uses the music,2 clothes, indifference, apathy, boredom, and exhaustion of 20-somethings to connect with them. The tagline of the production is, “The Youth Are F**ked.”
While this may have landed as audacious, exciting, shake-up-the-usual boring-classical-theater marketing copy when the play was first announced, it hit differently at 2pm on Wednesday, November 6, 2024.
This Romeo and Juliet opens with an actor asking the audience “How y’all doing!?” I’m sure the usual response is the full-throated “whoop” of those who have paid $100+ for a ticket, but on this particular day in this particular place, the response was distinctly muted. There was still a “the youth are voting” poster in the lobby.
This timing isn’t coincidental. The director again:
I was seeing November 5th coming…What if I tried to open a play around the election that was gonna sort of put a fire under young people about what's really, really hard about life right now?
I’m not sure what this production’s answer to that question is. It isn’t violence: yes, there’s blood and Romeo strangles Tybalt to death, but Paris’ death is cut and weapons appear only briefly. Someone thoughtfully added a thigh-holster with a dagger in it to Juliet’s funeral wear – since Romeo takes a pill to kill himself3 and doesn’t bring any weapons with him4 – and she falls over his lifeless body in an elegant backbend after a polite number of gasps.5
What *is* really really hard about life right now? And what is going to be really really hard for the next four years? So much. Yes. The Youth *Are* F**ked.6 For everything else, there’s Kit Connor’s biceps.7
Actor Timothy West
has died at age 90. He played King Lear four times in his 30s, 50s, 70s, and textually prescribed 80s, though he said,
I believe strongly that Lear is not as old as he says he is. If you play him as so old that it's reasonable for him to abdicate, then it just becomes a play about difficult family relations. It's much more effective to show that this man still has all his marbles to begin with and really should be ruling the country.
Those of us of a certain age remember him as the king in “Ever After.” He also played Sir Deadlock in the BBC’s staggering Bleak House, and was Bolingbrook opposite Ian McKellen’s Richard II.
West spoke beautifully about supporting his wife through her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. I recommend their “Great Canal Journeys” TV series if you are looking for entertainment of the “deeply soothing” variety. There are four seasons with them and the only moments of anxiety involve applying “gentle persuasion” to unstick picturesquely uncooperative locks.
King Lear Quarto on Antiques Roadshow
One of the pleasures of “Antiques Roadshow” is watching folks discover that things they thought were worthless have a very specific and very high value. See: the blanket thrown over a chair that was worth 1.8 million dollars or the watch that made a veteran fall to the ground and declare “you’ve got to be sh*tting me.”
This Third Quarto of Lear doesn’t quite reach that level, but it isn’t too shabby. The owner was quoted “ten to fifteen thousand dollars for this dirty little book8” and it sold for $57,500.
Quick Links
Stop panicking. Ben Affleck says that AI “cannot write you Shakespeare.” (But people like it!) We’re all going to be fine. FINE I tell you!
I’m not entirely sure what’s going on in Merchant rehearsals over at CSC (Dracula?) (A nightclub?) but I’m looking forward to finding out.
I’m very excited for David Hare’s new play about Ellen Terry and Henry Irving.
The Denzel Washington-Jake Gyllenhaal Othello has a full cast10 and will maybe also be a film?
The Jonathan Bailey Richard II has a full cast and a family tree.
Events
November 19 & 26, online, free – two of the lectures in the series Shakespeare’s Virtues: Three Lectures on Living, on Romeo and Juliet and Lear are still upcoming. A collaboration with the Von Hügel Institute for Critical Catholic Studies, they promise to explore “how Shakespeare’s virtues connect reason to passion, characters to context, and art to life.”
November 15-24, Portland/in person – Portland Opera presents Elvis Costello’s “The Juliet Letters.” Costello wrote the album after reading an article in The Guardian about people sending letters to “Juliet’s” Verona “address.” 11
Recommendations
The 19th century indigenous Broadway actress who wrote herself male roles. “I never had a part in a play which seemed suitable to me, and therefore I made one for myself.”
Dorothy Parker’s theater reviews got her fired but are delightful.
The Bayeux Tapestry (not a tapestry and almost certainly not made in Bayeux) is getting a new panel.
That time Fox News’ Roger Ailes wrote lyrics for a Broadway pop-rock musical about saving the planet. Featuring hot pants, gas masks, and the incredibly-named Kermit Bloomgarden.
Oh Tammy Faye. The show starts in a proctologist’s office and goes downhill from there, crashing through levels of tastelessness previously unknown to man. Jim Bakker’s infidelity is played for laughs, the parishioner he assaults returns with a literal vengeance as a high-stepping jezebel dressed like Sandy in Grease, and an AIDS patient appears in purgatory to tell Tammy Faye she’s One of the Good Ones. Add in rhymes like, “They say I’m wearing too much mascara / Welcome to my brand-new era” and I’m shocked that the very pretty theater they just spent $2.5 billion to lift into the air didn’t sink allll the way back down to the ground (and keep going) out of embarrassment. Here’s hoping the director’s next project (Hamlet! At the RSC!) is better.
From the same interview:
There's a song referenced in Romeo and Juliet: the nurse's servant Peter – after everybody thinks Juliet's dead – says to the musicians, “Will you play ‘Heart's Ease’? …So I use a pop song from this generation's vocabulary because that's what Shakespeare was doing. He was taking a song everybody knew and making a joke using it to lighten the mood on stage. And that's what I'm doing. It's not cynical. It's genuinely trying to do for a young audience what I firmly believe is what Shakespeare was trying to do with his audience.
This was one of the most moving choices, immediately bringing to mind all the teens who have died from fentanyl overdoses.
Usually Juliet kills herself with Romeo’s dagger. This has the potential to go *very wrong* if the actor playing Romeo does not carefully arrange his dying body to facilitate Juliet’s dagger access (i.e. don’t fall backwards if your sheath is on your back) or forgets his weapon altogether.
There is a (not so) happy medium here. No one needs over two minutes of “choking and spewing” to get the point across.
The actress playing Juliet posted about this on Instagram at intermission during the performance I attended. “I will love through these four years of as best i can,” Zegler continued. “F*ck donald trump.”
As has been extensively reported, they are very pretty. He not only does a pull up during the balcony scene, but also spends a not-insignificant amount of time dead hanging (foreshadowing?) from Juliet’s window. The fact that he then says “let me stand here” while dangling several feet in the air is another a triumph of the visual over the aural.
Various owners used the frontispiece to calculate how old the book is over the years, carefully subtracting the date of its original publication –1655 – from the years 1830, 1855, 1940, and 1955.
Why is this Romeo and Juliet set in the 1860s? Because that’s when the opera premiered.
And Shakespeare consultant! James Shapiro is listed and is excellent, but Ayanna Thompson is “the Othello whisperer.”
The film about this phenomena currently has a 43% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and “suffers from limp dialogue and an utter lack of surprises.”