Kissing by the Book: Connor and Zegler in Romeo & Juliet

When Sam Gold’s new production of Romeo and Juliet, starring PYTs Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, was announced back in April, the PR team came in hot. “THE YOUTH ARE F**KED,” shouted all the marketing materials, in a color scheme that Charli XCX would sign off on. The Gen-Z coding was immediate and blatant, and at the same time, the production styled its title Romeo + Juliet, apparently trying to rope in people who wept into their popcorn at the Baz Luhrmann movie while many brat-summer revelers were pre-utero. Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff would be writing music (OMG, one degree of Taylor Swift!); Kit and Rachel tried on silly sunglasses and played with stuffed animals in a promotional music video; the whole cast was hot and young and looked like they could all tell you a lot about your star chart. Where was Shakespeare in all this? Did it matter?

Marketing is marketing, and it might not have mattered then, but it certainly does now — now being the moment in which you can see all this high-key, try-hard set dressing clogging up Circle in the Square. At the center of the whole trendy, clubby, stuffed-animals-and-inflatable-furniture jumble is, as Cordelia once said to her dad, nothing. One could be forgiven for walking away from this show’s two (and a half) hours’ traffic thinking that maybe Romeo and Juliet is kind of mid after all. Such is the enervating effect of so aggressively clickbaity and uncurious a production.

Gold, whose work I have both loved and loathed, has recently been contributing to his show’s PR efforts by talking about its opening line: “‘Two households, both alike in dignity’ … That was just going through my head for years,” he said. “Our community could use a dose of the feeling that we’re more the same than we are different.” Sure, we live in a belligerent epoch in an ever more violently polarized country. Perhaps Romeo and Juliet’s feuding families, the Capulets and Montagues, might have something to say to us about that. Whether they do or not, there’s no great proof of the play’s contemporary resonance to be seen here, despite all the baggy jeans, chunky chain necklaces, and genderfluid Y2K athleisure. There’s hardly proof of its coherence. Gold has taken his theory of shared humanity so far that in this Verona, everybody looks and acts like they all live and party in the exact same square mile of Bushwick when they’re not hitting up the Buffalo Exchange across from NYU Tisch. The in-the-round scenic design by dots is essentially a club — dance floor in the center, DJ pulpit on one side (Sarah Goldstone, the show’s musician, is housed there), and another raised platform with an enormous pink teddy bear (because why not) on the other. The lobby’s got a merch table and an arcade claw machine and a lot of bumping pink lighting. It’s also got a table dedicated to registering the youth vote, which, cool, okay, points for that.

To be clear, I am not advocating for a Romeo and Juliet where the Montagues are stumping for Harris/Walz and the Capulets are all wearing red trucker hats (something like that, God help us, is already happening at the Folger Theatre in D.C.). We don’t need to be force-fed relatable literalism, but we do need to have some idea of who these two households are and of the depths to which they feel and identify by their “ancient grudge,” no matter how “alike in dignity” they may appear on the surface. In Gold’s world, though, surface is all there is — indifferent dignity with a heavy glaze of alikeness. Before the play begins, the cast bops around together onstage, vaping and chilling on a blow-up chaise longue and sharing a Kool-Aid-like substance from a plastic gallon jug covered in Sharpie graffiti. Goldstone cranks up the beat, and soon enough, the lights are flashing and the dancing has turned into violence (Sonya Tayeh’s choreography includes a lot of passionate grappling and attempting not to fall off the stage). Why are these kids fighting, apart from the fact that Samson (Gían Pérez) just bit his thumb at Abraham (Daniel Bravo Hernández)? Why does the fighting morph into weird-sexy-almost-make-out-times and then back again? If there are no real adults in this world — and there certainly don’t seem to be — what does it actually matter when Gabby Beans (who doubles as Romeo’s friend Mercutio and as his mentor Friar Lawrence) enters with a microphone to threaten the brawlers with death should they “disturb our streets again”? When Beans speaks into a mic, she’s neither of her primary characters; she’s a kind of chorus (she delivers most of the opening sonnet) as well as a stand-in for the play’s missing authority figure, Prince Escalus. “And the prince decrees,” she says flatly before delivering lines that, in Shakespeare’s play, belong to an actual person. Here, it’s a floating voice, sans character, sans peril.

Gold also has both of Juliet’s parents, Lord and Lady Capulet, played by the same actor, Sola Fadiran, who barely distinguishes them (Lady Cap is a touch more femme to start out with, but it’s hardly consistent). Likewise, Tommy Dorfman, doubling as the Nurse and Tybalt—Juliet’s raunchy nanny and her violent cousin—seems more invested in showing off her outfits than in crafting two distinctive, compelling human beings. The production’s website describes the young generation of this Romeo and Juliet as being “left to their own devices in their parents’ world of violent ends,” but even if we accept a neglectful vacuum in place of most of the play’s older characters, we’ve got to understand the violence they’ve cultivated and feel its danger. What are its stakes? Why do the kids feel compelled to continue it? What do they think they are fighting — either against or for?

There are no answers here, just a lot of half-hearted textwork and a couple of generically shimmery songs by Antonoff, awkwardly inserted so Zegler can show off her voice. It’s very nice. Her Juliet, though, is woefully underbaked. She feels, like almost everyone in the show, disturbingly unspecific. The fact that Romeo first lays eyes on her not in a mutual moment of revelation, but as she performs a bubbly pop song at the Capulets’ party, means that no miracle occurs between them. Instead, she remains just a cute girl with a microphone and he just another cute guy in the crowd. That feeling of blur and blandness seeps everywhere: Beans is a fantastic actor, but who is her Mercutio, apart from a low voice and minimal costume change from her Friar? Who are any of these people?

It’s my experience, especially with Shakespeare, that mediocre performances belong at a director’s doorstep as much as at an actor’s, and Gold isn’t pushing any of his cast, let alone his two leads. Connor has a head start: He at least knows what he’s saying, and his Romeo is solid enough. He’s attempting the part’s leaps and dives, but his performance still frequently feels like a first offer, the reading that a responsible actor brings in to early rehearsals so that then he and the director can begin the real work. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet vaults into the emotional stratosphere in Act Three and stays there till its finish. An ensemble has to figure out how to hit that fortissimo and then hold it — convincingly, breathtakingly, without wearing down an audience. But no one on Gold’s stage is expanding to meet the play. When, banished to Mantua near the end, Connor’s Romeo hears news that Juliet is dead, he does his best to throw himself into Romeo’s howl of despair: “Then I defy you,” he shouts — then a deadening pause creeps in, his energy deflates, and he finishes the line with the thing he’s meant to be defying: “… stars.”

This kind of flubbed follow-through, of dropping the ball or never consistently getting it airborne, betrays an avoidance, a misunderstanding, or perhaps even a mistrust of the very tools Shakespeare’s language provides. There’s gold in those hills, but it has to be mined. Instead, the show feels like someone took a pin to that inflatable couch — air is constantly hissing out of it. There’s no breathlessness, no tension, no danger. Sloppy casualness rules. When Zegler’s Juliet warns Romeo that her family will literally murder him if they catch him beneath her balcony, she speaks the line as if it’s all just chat. Earlier, when Dorfman’s Nurse tells her young charge that the boy she’s fallen for is “a Montague, / The only son of your great enemy,” she may as well be ordering takeout. Lines are flat where they should sparkle and pausey where they should fly. No one is seeing what they’re saying, and to add insult to injury, Antonoff consistently underscores the story’s most emotional moments with a dirge-like procession of notes that sounds like someone on benzos is trying to learn to play the organ. Any remaining chance the actors have at generating their own pathos, their own power, is fatally undermined.

There’s a production hiding deep inside this one that I suspect may have been the one Gold was dreaming of. There, the ensemble all look of a piece, because this particular group of young people — group of friends, even — has gathered together with the sincere and urgent intention of telling this particular story. They have a reason for telling it, and in the telling, their own specific humanity shimmers across the faces of their characters like light on water — we can still see them, but we can also see and sense the depth of the people they are taking the time to bring to life. We understand why we have been invited to join them in this rite, and we all walk away from it breathing differently. But I talk of dreams,

Which are the children of an idle brain, 

Begot of nothing but vain fantasy, 

Which is as thin of substance as the air

And more inconstant than the wind …

In the meantime, the tragedy that’s unfolding at Circle in the Square isn’t in the play but of it. Frankly, the youth seem fine. It’s Shakespeare who’s f**ked.

If you’re still looking to scratch an itch for feuding households and high drama, Alaska Thunderfuck’s got you covered. The winner of Drag Race All Stars season two (“probably one of the very best seasons,” a Drag Race aficionado friend told me confidently) has just sashayed into a sequin-splattered Off Broadway extravaganza of her own creation, Drag: The Musical, co-written with Tomas Costanza and Ashley Gordon. Featuring Alaska herself as proprietress of the Cat House drag club Kitty Galloway, along with a plethora of fellow queens including Jujubee, Jan Sport, and Luxx Noir London, Drag does exactly what it says on the tin, then throws in a jubilant encore (because whoever said “Always leave them wanting more” never met a drag queen). It’s got looks, reads, death drops, wigs-wigs-wigs, and — underneath all the shade and side-eye of its bitter battle between “two drag houses, both alike in their lack of dignity” — it’s also got a big, squishy heart. The queens aren’t the only standouts: Eddie Korbich is a hoot as Drunk Jerry, that one particular old guy at the club who’s high as a hot-air balloon and wants to tell you all about the time he was in London in June of ’69, and J. Elaine Marcos absolutely kills her cameos as three different plot devices in human form, from a sadistic IRS agent to a gentrifying terror named Rita LaRitz whose ludicrously capacious bag is almost as big as she is. If you’re a New Kids on the Block fan, you can squeal to your heart’s content at an extremely game Joey McIntyre playing the requisite “straight man” — the accountant brother to Kitty’s rival queen, Alexis Gillmore (Nick Adams) — and singing a Brand New–esque banger about how he “likes Star Wars and Pearl Jam.” It’s silly, it’s splashy, everyone’s rocking it on vocals (no lip-syncing here), the glamtastic costumes by Marco Marco just keep on coming, and if you’re not already giggling at Alexis’s distractingly huge biceps, just wait for Kitty’s equally distractingly huge funeral hat. (It pops into existence like one of those collapsible windshield sunshades, and, honestly, I was not prepared.) For now, forget the Capulets and the Montagues. There’s much more fun to be had with the queens from the Cat House and the Fish Tank.