Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen in Romeo and Juliet, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewiecz

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Crazy kids. Access to lethal drugs. No hobbies except hanging out, mixing it up, getting into brawls (and turning iambic pentameter into actual speaking).

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That’s downtown Verona for you, in David Horak’s indeterminately contemporary, very speedy Romeo and Juliet. It’s the second of the two productions the Freewill Shakespeare Festival has brought to the beautiful, vintage Cristal Palace Spiegeltent at Edmonton EXPO Centre. And it moves along at a clip that, especially up close in a 220-seat spiegeltent, feels dangerous — an experience enhanced by Matthew Skopyk’s sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll original score with its ominous industrial shudders and sheen.

They may not have summer festivals with green onion cakes.  But one thing they do have in fair Verona is a distinctive civic culture, marked by “canker’d hate,” a lethal feud between a couple of haut-bourgeois families. That “ancient grudge” between the Montagues and the Capulets is so long-standing it counts as a bona fide tradition — some things never get old — and so flammable it can erupt into violence when someone says “I bite my thumb at you.” It’s the Veronese F-you! apparently. Hey, it’s only fun taunting people till someone loses an eye, or a cousin Tybalt.

The circumstances set forth dramatically in the first scene by Horak’s agile 10-actor cast, constantly in motion on and off the stage, let you stop wondering why Romeo and Juliet don’t try dating before they, you know, get married. And that’s just a matter of minutes (I exaggerate only slightly) after they meet, a compression in the story of the star-cross’d lovers that’s a keynote of Horak’s adaptation, which favours action over speech. The world from which they impulsively try to carve a little place for themselves (as per that song in West Side Story) is too dangerous, fraught, stressful for them to have a relationship first.

The parental generation, in both families, is more of a back story than a presence in this Romeo and Juliet. It’s conflated mainly into the figure of Lady Capulet, a formidable cold-eyed authoritarian in Brett Dahl’s performance, who strides in and out of rooms like a hot knife through butter. Even indoors, nobody just saunters in Verona; it must be something in the water.

Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen in Romeo and Juliet, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

The lovers (Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen) do have youthful chemistry. They fall for each other instantly at the Capulet’s big masquerade bash (fanciful choreography by Glenda Stirling) that the Montague lads have crashed on a gang dare. And you do get the attraction in this production. Both Ardern and Nguyen have the same light, contemporary cadence and timbre in delivering the verse, for one thing.

In the performance by the resourceful Ardern (Maria on alternate nights in Twelfth Night), gender isn’t bold-faced. Romeo is played as a boy, but the actor doesn’t lean into macho signals in voice or posture.  Nguyen’s performance as Juliet isn’t of the wistful, poetical femininity lineage either. The impulses of the pair work the same way at the same speed.

The “yoke of inauspicious stars” is worn quite lightly. The so-called “balcony scene” is playful; R and J are having fun with the luscious poetry of it. And so, more unexpectedly, is the production’s original way with the scene when Romeo leaves Juliet for his banishment after their night in bed. The stakes are high: death if Romeo doesn’t get out of town pronto. As he reacts to Juliet’s exhortation to stay longer, “come death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so!”, they’re both laughing.

No one has told them they’re in a tragedy; till then it’s a hot adventure. Nguyen’s quick-witted Juliet doesn’t really dig into the verse till the prospect of spending the night in the Capulet family tomb, “this palace of dim night,” hits home.

The more dimensional relationships in Horak’s production are between the lads, Romeo and his pals. Scott Shpeley (Orsino in Twelfth Night) is a volatile, dangerously excitable Mercutio, in a performance that’s charismatic, both verbally and physically. He doesn’t even get to linger on the famously weird and fantastical Queen Mab speech, shortened in this adaptation. And after the fatal fracas with Tybalt, and Romeo’s inept intervention, his furious exit line, “a plague on both your houses,” burns through the play like a brand.

Nadien Chu in Romeo and Juliet, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

Kris Unruh (a frolicsome Olivia in Twelfth Night) is the conciliatory, more reasonable follower Benvolio. Peace-makers, including Friar Laurence (Troy O’Donnell), don’t get much traction in Verona.

The casting in a two-play rep season, in which Romeo and Juliet shares its cast with Twelfth Night, is intriguing and resonant. The wonderfully nutty comic gravity of Shpeley’s performance as Orsino in the comedy alternates with the lethally manic Mercutio, who brings it in Romeo and Juliet. Alternating with wry, sly Feste in the comedy, Dean Stockdale is an unhinged and violent Tybalt. And Nadien Chu, sensationally funny as the extrovert boozehound Lady Toby in Twelfth Night, is the warm-hearted chatterbox of a Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the only parental figure who counts in the Veronese landscape.

In the end, this Romeo and Juliet doesn’t really have much tragic impact, exciting though it is to watch, especially up close. It’s not what you’d call heartbreaking; it’s too schematic for that. But it feels explosive in the intimate setting of the spiegeltent. The fighting (choreographed by Janine Waddell) is visceral and sweaty in a way that the romance doesn’t get into, in this streamlined, intelligible adaptation of a story with an ending we know in advance. It’s all about capturing what it feels like to be young and in the moment.

Read the 12thnight review of Twelfth Night here. 

REVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Romeo and Juliet (running in rep with Twelfth Night

Directed by: David Horak

Starring: Jessy Ardern, Christina Nguyen, Brett Dahl, Scott Shpeley, Kris Unruh, Dean Stockdale, Graham Mothersill, Nadien Chu, Troy O’Donnell, Yassine El Fassi El Fihri

Where: Cristal Palace Spiegeltent at Edmonton EXPO Centre, 7515 118 Ave.

Running:  through Sept. 3, Romeo and Juliet on all odd nights and even matinees, Twelfth Night on all even nights and odd matinees. Check out freewillshakespeare.com for a full schedule of extra pre- and post-show events.

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com