Canadian Stage’s Dream in High Park opened on Thursday night.  This year it’s Marie Farsi’s production (adaptation?) of Romeo and Juliet.  It’s given a Southern Italian setting in the 1930s/40s though any reference to Fascism or the war escaped me.  It seemed largely an excuse to introduce some singing and dancing and some slightly forced humour into the opening scenes.  That’s not the big problem though.

Romeo and Juliet is fundamentally about a deep seated feud between two elite families that transcends individuals and generations.  The lovers are trapped by it and Friar Lawrence’s high minded, if risky, effort to reconcile the families only makes sense if it’s longstanding and serious.  That’s what makes it a tragedy.  Shorn of the feud it’s just a romantic melodrama.  And in this show the feud is diminished to almost nothing.  There is little sense of enduring deadly hate.  Early on Capulets and Montagues dance together to a band led, implausibly, by Friar Lawrence and Friar John.  There’s no real sense of menace and danger when Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio gate crash the Capulets’ feast.

The confrontation between Capulet and Tybalt about whether to go after Romeo is feeble.  Tybalt here is a whiny youth not the heir to leadership of the clan Capulet so there’s no sense that this a generational confrontation between an older man disposed to end the feud and a younger, but still powerful, one determined to continue it.  The older Montagues are simply cut so there’s no substance to the idea of two families “alike in dignity”.  And to cap it all the final scene is cut with Friar John simply intoning “Never was there such tale of woe as that of Juliet and her Romeo”.  No reconciliation, no point.

Other elements are a bit odd too.  Juliet, as one might expect, is fairly closely “guarded” despite being described here as eighteen.  Fair enough, but why, then, is Benvolio, who is here turned into a girl (not just played by a female actor, she’s given female pronouns), allowed to roister and brawl with the boys? The one plot change that worked rather well was expanding Friar John’s role to a kind of chorus who has dialogue that carries us over some of the cuts.

The acting is pretty uneven too.  By and large the older characters are fine.  Mike Shara pretty much steals the show with a nuanced and dignified portrayal of Capulet.  Diego Matamoros, as Friar Lawrence, and Matthew Brown, as Friar John, at least show that they can can speak Shakespeare convincingly.  The rest is a bit of a mixed bag of inconsistent accents, diction and characterisation.

Lili Beaudoin grows into quite a sympathetic and credible Juliet from a shaky start but why the Brooklyn accent?  Praneet Akilla, as Romeo, comes off as a bit goofy without the steelier/aristocratic aspects of a young Montague, but sympathetic enough.  Daniel Krmpotic’ Paris appears very young rather than the older, mature suitor the text implies.  Questions of gender apart, Mellie Ng, as Benvolio, seems more at home with Shakespeare’s language than most of the cast.  The rest seems to be playing this as a sort of rom-com.  That may be the direction rather than the acting though.

It’s hard to severely compress Shakespeare plays, especially the darker and more well known ones.  To be honest I’m not sure why Canadian Stage tries to do it.  It didn’t work with Hamlet last year and it doesn’t work with this Romeo and Juliet.  It might be better to stick to the fluffier stuff for the park.

Romeo and Juliet runs in High Park until August 31st.

Photo credit: Dahlia Katz