You’ve heard of star-crossed lovers, but how about star-crossed productions? The Romeo and Juliet that’s opening at the American Repertory Theatre February 4 has had its share of troubles, and I don’t mean dueling in the streets of Verona. Designated director János Szász quit during casting to take a film. He was replaced by Israeli Gadi Roll, incoming associate director of the New Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, England. ART artistic director Robert Woodruff made the quick choice. “I wanted the production to have a toughness that reflected the steel in the set. Gadi was the first idea I had.”
Then, after choosing his cast and rehearsing for three weeks, Roll dropped the actor playing Romeo and replaced him with ART Institute graduate Mickey Solis, who had been slated to play Romeo’s best friend, Benvolio. “It happened on Friday the 13th [of January] and a full moon,” Solis recalls. “I had felt that something was going to happen. He very calmly altered my life.”
A tall, dark-eyed fledgling matinee idol, Solis also traded up last spring, from a small part in the ART’s Desire Under the Elms to brooding youngest son Eben, in which he made a powerful impression. And that was on top of his blowout performance in the harrowing Olly’s Prison earlier in the season. Solis had been primed for a possible Romeo nod from Szász (who helmed Desire) before the Hungarian director went missing.
So your name is Mickey Solis and you’ve got three weeks to memorize a heap more lines of Shakespeare’s verse, plus flesh out one of the world’s most famous lovers. “It’s trial by fire, man. I don’t like working this way. It’s too compact. I like to come in the door with reading, watching films, thinking about the play.”
Solis calls Roll his “only life preserver. He came in the first day of rehearsal with an existential philosophy of Verona, about what’s it’s like to live in an environment that is compressed, moralistically perverted, [filled with] old hatreds. Romeo and Juliet are the outsiders, existing outside the system of hate, of violence. They are doomed from day one. The moment he sees Juliet, he knows he has seen truth and beauty and he’s willing to go all the way.”
While rehearsing Benvolio, Solis had talked a bit with Annika Boras, who’s paying Juliet; he’d met her boyfriend and gone out for drinks with them. Boras, one of a select few Americans to graduate from Britain’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, says it was “not a divorce” to lose her first Romeo. “We were only sketching scenes, no real depth of work. Now Mickey and I are able to dive in.”
“When you find out you’re Romeo to someone’s Juliet, something happens,” Solis adds. “Now we’re playing catch-up. Put that mountain in front of me and I’ll climb up. I suppose that’s the actor’s life.”
ROMEO AND JULIET | American Repertory Theatre, Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St, Cambridge | February 4–March 25 | $37-$74; $15 students | 617.547.8300 or www.amrep.org
