It's asking a lot of a company of actors to conjure the warmth of a blazing Italian sun when a chilly wind is blowing off Lake Eola on the first night of spring. Yet not even the lingering bite of winter keeps the Orlando Shakespeare Festival's Romeo and Juliet from bringing the heat, the boredom and the raging adolescent hormones of 16th-century Verona to vivid life. Friday's opening performance at Lake Eola Park's Walt Disney Amphitheater may have forced the audience to pull its woolens out of mothballs. Yet the strength of director Peggy Shannon's production is that it allows us to forget about the cold and to drink in the fervid beauty of Shakespeare's play. This is no sweet-tempered, sugar-coated love story but rather a play about love and hatred allowed to run amok. If all of the festival's company do not live up to the standards of its most impressive players, Shannon's production still lays bare the ravages of such emotions. And it presents with a nearly absolute clarity the essence of Shakespeare's words. That ease with the language makes this Romeo and Juliet an apt beginning for those unused to the intricacies of Elizabethan English. It helps, of course, that most theatergoers know the basics of the tragic tale. Yet the company handles the play's lyric poetry so beautifully that the intention of every speech is utterly clear. The young people of Shannon's production are not moony, starry-eyed teen-agers but rambunctious, goofy, burdened with too much time and nothing to do. Their high spirits make them overeager to tangle with each other. And the same spirits make Romeo, the Montagues' only son, too much a slave to his own emotions, too much in love with love. That quality is funny at first, and Matthew Mabe makes the most of it. Slack-jawed, a little idiotic, he seems in the first few scenes like a slightly more | high-minded cousin to Wayne's World's grinning numbskulls. As the tragedy progresses, Mabe's heightened emotions become steadily more frightening. Lisa Colbert's 13-year-old Juliet is grave and sweet and openhearted, and she grows up before our eyes. Yet her character is not as finely drawn as Romeo's, and the love between them is not quite tangible. Several other key roles seem underexplored: Thomas Kelly's cheerful, loose-tongued Mercutio might have a more lunatic edge, and Paul M. Wegman's lucid, well-meaning Friar Laurence might seem more completely ravaged by the calamities he sees. Yet Lynn Brinkley finds in Juliet's nurse all the jollity, silliness and heartbreak she must, and Jim Helsinger brings a beautifully realized good nature to Romeo's friend Benvolio. Rainard Rachele discovers a wealth of conflicted emotions in Lord Capulet, and Ben Gunter an elfin mischievousness in a servant named Peter. And Shannon knows exactly how to shift from the play's joviality to its anguish. We may see the Three Stooges in the Capulets' servants, and one of the Montague clan may drop his pants and provide the night with a second moon. Yet the terror of excess hovers all around this production - in the way Romeo falls on the floor in a heap of agony, in the desperate realization of Romeo and Friar Laurence that a feeling man and a thinking man share no common ground. We've come to expect, in the festival's three seasons, that its stagings will be handsome; this year it has conquered the amphitheater's sound problems, as well. But more impressive in just three years is the growing strength of the productions, the growing sense that the festival knows what Shakespeare is all about. The acting company still needs seasoning. Yet the audience for Shakespeare in Orlando seems in ever more competent hands. |
