THE LOOK OF LOVE: Bravo and Curfman. |
Unreformed romantics may enjoy a Lear here or a Hamlet there, but what they’re really doing is waiting around for Romeo and Juliet. They’re in luck with the Colonial Theater Shakespeare Festival, held in Westerly’s beautiful Wilcox Park (Tuesdays through Sundays through August 6). This is the fest’s 16th year, but the tale of star-crossed lovers hasn’t been staged since 1996.The play was the Bard’s ninth in his first two prolific years of playwriting and his first competent tragedy, Titus Andronicus being the rarely performed bloodbath that it is. Between that revenge play and the tragic romance came four comedies, including The Taming of the Shrew, a more cynical take on amorous accord among hot-blooded Italians.
To refresh memories: in fair Verona, Romeo’s House of Montague and Juliet’s House of Capulet are at potentially lethal odds, to the extent that the Prince (Chris Perrotti) furiously threatens death to any of the quick-tempered young men who break the peace with further swordplay in the streets. Romeo (Enrique Bravo) and Juliet (Jennifer Curfman) are mutually smitten when he sneaks masked into a party at her house, and in the famous balcony scene that quickly follows he agrees to marry her. They secretly do so, a decision further complicated when her father (Edward Franklin) insists that she marry Count Paris (Phillip Leipf).
A further obstacle to their families condoning the match is that Romeo soon kills her cousin Tybalt (Charles Anthony). Tybalt had just killed his friend Mercutio (Paul Romero), who was run through when Romeo came between the two trying to break up the fight with his new, unacknowledged cousin. (Romero reprises his swaggering performance of 10 years ago at Wilcox.) Banished rather than executed, since Tybalt started the fight, Romeo flees the city, returning only to kill himself at the tomb of Juliet, not having received the message that she is only drugged to appear dead.
Directed by Harland Meltzer, the Westerly production comes alive in the second half, after the dueling deaths provide enough emotional momentum. But the several engaging performances are offset by a few lackluster ones, which remind us that this play lasts three-plus hours. Bravo’s Romeo eventually warms up to his passionate tasks of impetuous murder and impatient wooing. But at the outset the young Montague has little spark to be fanned, so there’s neither conviction nor combustion in the mutual love-at-first-sight scene with Juliet; since there was no evidence of latent joy to be tapped — he’d been brooding about his unrequited love for Rosaline, whom we never see — there is no depth to the emotion we do see.
In another scene fraught with potential emotion, when Juliet’s father discovers that she is dead, actor Edward Franklin’s response is not merely understated, it’s absent. The contrast with Kate Konigisor’s fully inhabited performance as Lady Capulet, his wife, is striking.
Curfman’s vivacious Juliet goes far to compensate, providing a thoughtful as well as winsome presence in scene after scene. And when she teams up with a performer on her level, the synergy can pull us further in, such as when Juliet is trying to pry information about the swordfight deaths from Marion Markham’s excitable Nurse. Other actors who engage us from the get-go include David Schmittou as Romeo’s friend Benvolio and Charles Anthony as the ill-fated Tybalt, who sublimates some of his irascible character’s temperament into equally energetic affection, being playful with his cousin Juliet. Bob Colonna as Friar Lawrence, who secretly marries the young couple and suggests she feign death, is fully convincing in both jesting and anguished modes.
The set design by John Raley simply provides façades of the adjacent Montague and Capulet houses, with plenty of room for sword fighting — well-choreographed but uncredited — in the street before them. Odd¬ly, for the bedroom scenes, of Romeo and Juliet waking up together and her discovered “suicide,” use isn’t made of the intimate little dropped-down space at the stage front; the bed is brought stage center. As you’d expect from a company limited to Shakespeare, the costume design by Shima Ushiba effectively plunges us into the period.
Admission is free, but $10 donations are requested.
