#ROMEO AND JULIET SONGS UPDATE FOR THE#
#ROMEO AND JULIET SONGS FULL OF PEOPLE#

Romeo And Juliet Songs Update For The

Shakespeares famous play is updated to the hip modern suburb of Verona still retaining its original dialogue. Romeo and Juliet: Beyond Words. As members of the feuding Capulet and Montague families, Romeo and Juliet should be sworn enemies, but they fall deeply in love and marry in secret. That very day, disastrous circumstances lead Romeo to fight and kill Juliet’s cousin Tybalt, setting off a chain of events that culminate in tragedy.What do you get when you take a 4000-year-old play, which is divisive in its own right, and make a flaccid update for the MTV generation? You get 'Romeo + Juliet', an embarrassing misfire from a talented cast and crew. I won't bother going over the finer plots points, since most of us have had to read it at some point in high school I'd rather focus on the film as its own entity. Unfortunately, bad decisions are abound from the start.

But rather than letting the planned production die on the vine, they decided to rethink it as a film for television.The fundamentals, as they say, are sound: Josh O'Connor (recently seen playing a miserable Charles on The Crown) and Jessie Buckley (recently seen in, among other things, the Charlie Kaufman film I'm Thinking Of Ending Things) play Romeo and Juliet, not as starry-eyed teenagers but as lustful and trapped young adults. This version was intended as a theatrical run produced by London's National Theatre for the summer of 2020 we know how that turned out. And so it does now, as Great Performances on PBS presents a new take on the play. What makes things last? What makes people want to revisit them over and over? (And please don't say 'quality.' It is sometimes quality, but it is certainly not always quality, and even within the Shakespeare world but certainly outside of it, attempts to correlate greatness of work with cultural penetration and permanence will turn you into a human shruggie emoji.)Perhaps it's because a story of love and hate — and the awful work of trying to beat the latter with the former — always feels timely. Pretty Piece of Flesh, One Inch Punch 5.Why do people still perform Romeo & Juliet? That, to mangle a reference, is the question.It's not the question because there's anything wrong with the play or with producing the play or with updating the play it's just, genuinely, a question.

Romeo And Juliet Songs Full Of People

Empty theaters seem to have memories, as if each performance that's ever happened inside them left a few dust motes that are still floating around. Not just when they're full of people, noisy with music and drama, but even when they're not. Instead, because of the way it's produced and shot, it serves as one of the most poignant and touching love stories about theater itself that could possibly come out of the devastation the pandemic has brought to live performance.It is my personal bias, I admit, that theaters are the closest things we have to magical places. Director Simon Godwin had never directed a film, but he has a great theater pedigree — in fact, he's currently the artistic director of the Shakespeare Theater Company right here in D.C.This is an interesting and fresh production of the play that steers away particularly hard from any ingenue notion of Juliet Buckley performs Juliet as a woman who's trapped and bound by obligation, and her instant draw to O'Connor's Romeo feels, for both of them, less like a twinkly starlight blush and more like the way grown and unhappy people can pull in the direction of each other for the simple reason that they have seen in someone else a glimmer of hope.But what makes this film more than a fine addition to the tellings and retellings of Shakespeare is a timeliness that has little to do with Romeo & Juliet's foundational love and hate.

May we all be together in their thrall very soon.Romeo & Juliet premieres on Great Performances on PBS on April 23. But it's also a moving document that shows the cavernous spaces and folding tables and impossibly high walls and ceilings that make theaters haunting and beautiful.

Romeo And Juliet Movie Songs