This year’s cinematic Romeo and Juliet

Oh, please. The headline is not a spoiler. More than 400 years after the play was written, “young doomed love” is the Romeo and Juliet brand, and I suspect that most anyone coming to see something with that title on it would actually be disappointed with a happy ending. True, they did such things in the 1800s, but it proved a passing phase.

Odds are that those kooky kids from Verona are dying somewhere in the world every night. However, movies about them, while not infrequent, only come along every so often. The newest appeared this past weekend and made a spectacular belly flop at the box office, averaging just over $1,100 per theatre, meaning that based on the average U.S. movie ticket price from 2012, about 136 people saw it per theatre between Friday and Sunday. A dud by any other name would smell as bad.

Some will say the film died due to lack of stars: Hallie Steinfeld was impeccable in True Grit but she didn’t become a teen queen as a result; Douglas Booth was entirely unknown to me, as were his prior film and TV credits. Ed Westwick brought some Gossip Girl capital as Tybalt, but apparently not enough; fine actors such as Damian Lewis, Stellan Skarsgard, Natascha McElhone and Paul Giamatti have been in some great movies, but no one buys tickets for R & J to see the adults, do they?

The fact is, while staying true to the R & J brand in storyline, period design and almost all things, the film’s producer and creator failed to attend to one of the world’s most powerful brands: William Shakespeare.  That’s why their film seemed a folly as soon as we started hearing snippets of airy language that sounded old-timey but not Shakespearean in the trailers, and accelerated when screenwriter Julian Fellowes, ostensibly promoting the film, pompously informed us mere mortals that most people can’t understand Shakespeare and that thanks to his own highly expensive education, he was well suited to dumb down old Will for the rest of us. Yes, this new R & J offered up the sure-fire marketing lure of simplified language for all the dolts who like their Shakespeare de-caf.

A Klingon Shakespeare buff

To be fair, only a handful of countries of the world actually hear Shakespeare in its original language; he is a foreign playwright on most continents and so we don’t know what is actually being spoken in countless productions. His stories take priority, not the precise words. This gives weight to a brilliant joke in Star Trek VI when an alien character urges that Shakespeare is best heard “in the original Klingon.”  But it is an act of perversity to translate Shakespeare from English to English, one even odder than English language operas in North America that still feel compelled to provide supertitles.

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the Shakespeare brand carries a mixed message. On the one hand: greatest playwright in history, profound insights, timeless plots, stunning language. On the other: the language does in fact stun some people into incomprehension, and years of bad English teachers and ill-advised productions have made Shakespeare seem a daunting experience for so many who might enjoy his work if they weren’t so afraid of it.

I am not Shakespeare, nor was meant to be.

Even though this new R & J film wasn’t a studio production, it summons visions of pitch meetings out of What Makes Sammy Run: “I’m giving you the straight dope. Shakespeare – great story man, little wordy though, language a little dusty. Here’s what we do: we keep absolutely everything that makes his stuff sell year after century, but we put it in language everyone can understand. But let’s keep it British. Maybe we can get that Downton Abbey guy to do a rewrite.”

The result was a product which tried to exploit the Shakespeare brand at the same time as it was draining it of its appeal. For people who find the word Shakespeare daunting, just the mention of his name can be a a turn-off; for those whose hearts flutter when they hear it, bowdlerizing the language eliminates any interest in seeing it. That’s not to suggest that reinventions of Shakespeare aren’t fair game: it’s been done in everything from Joe Macbeth to West Side Story to 10 Things I Hate About You. Even Sons of Anarchy is rooted in Hamlet. Heck, in Washington DC, there’s the Synetic Theatre, which is acclaimed for wordless Shakespeare. But Synetic isn’t foolish enough to sell their work as the same old Will and just get by with a program insert saying,” At this evening’s performance, the actors will be mute.”

I’m no Shakespeare scholar any more than I am a movie box office prognosticator, but having seen two stage Romeo and Juliets in the past two weeks, I admit to schadenfreude at the film’s failure, since it was such a foolish business move from the moment Fellowes’ agent got the call (surely after Tom Stoppard fell over laughing) and because I could have called it the moment that first trailer came to light. Our lovers will live to die another day on stage and screen; the IBDB alerts me to a Romeo and Juliet in Harlem due out next year. Using the original language. As for this version, its failure is no tragedy – and certainly not a Shakespearean one.

With three Romeo and Juliet productions currently underway in New York – on Broadway, Off-Broadway at Classic Stage Company and a return engagement of the company 3 Day Hangover‘s decidedly non-traditional depiction – and a new film version due out this coming Friday, it seems time to inaugurate “Pop Goes Shakespeare,” which might just as easily be called “Shakespeare Goes Pop.” Whatever your preference, my plan, in this Shakespeare-heavy NYC theatre season, is just to periodically ramble through an array of Shakespearean adaptations and appropriations in film, TV and music. You can expect my entries on Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens to be exceptionally brief.

Considering there’s already rumblings among the purists about the admittedly peculiar decision by the new Romeo and Juliet film to have Downton Abbey‘s Julian Fellowes rewrite true Shakespeare into faux Shakespeare, it seems worthwhile to note how many different ways the Bard has already been retooled, rebooted and revised. Yet the couple always seems to survive to die another day.

Marketing for a 1930s film version, directed by George Cukor, with Leslie Howard, Norma Shearer and John Barrymore, went in for the hard sell – but was a bit cautious about any of that off-putting dialogue slipping out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D6BxQwYQ4I

An authoritative voice-over and giant fonts ruled again in 1954 when Laurence Harvey (pre-Manchurian Candidate) played Romeo opposite British actress Susan Shentall as Juliet. She was apparently so successful in the role that she never appeared on screen again (and hadn’t appeared before this either):

In the tumult of 1968, as Vietnam raged and hippies sprang into full flower, Franco Zeffirelli’s classical take on the story, with 15 year old Olivia Hussey as the 14 year old Juliet, found favor with audiences. It didn’t hurt that, as both Tom Lehrer and Stephen Sondheim advised, it had “a tune you can hum” that made the pop charts. But here’s a sonnet:

Another youth oriented take came in 1996, when Baz Luhrman lent his hyperkinetic style to a modern day version of the story, with youthful Claire Danes (pre-CIA duty) and Leonardo DiCaprio (pre-iceberg) as our hero and heroine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjxHdNxvySU

Want to get the kiddoes started on the Bard early? You might like some of the anthropomorphized animal versions of R & J. Perhaps you’d enjoy the story as puppy love, with seal pups, in the unfortunately titled Romeo and Juliet: Sealed With a Kiss:

Or if you can’t watch animated seals without worrying about the fate of real ones, perhaps you’d prefer the story set among garden gnomes (which are in no way endangered, so relax), accompanied by songs from Sir Elton John, and voiced by James MacAvoy and Emily Blunt:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPQyg8XtGsw

Turning to more adult versions, there’s the inevitable ultra low-budget zombified version of the story, Romeo and Juliet vs. The Living Dead:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj27pNtnB2Q

The lunatics at Troma Films, the auteurs behind The Toxic Avenger films, manipulated the story to their own warped ends for Tromeo and Juliet:

Oh, and if you’ve ever been hungry for a martial arts/gangster interpretation, perhaps you aren’t familiar with the oeuvre of Jet Li and the late singer Aaliyah, who bonded in a film with the spoilery title Romeo Must Die in 2000:

On stage, while Tom Stoppard offered up truncated texts of Hamlet and Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet had to settle for my friends at the Reduced Shakespeare Company, who travestied the romance in a version that, by their standards, is rather long. It took two videos to include it all. Get on the ball, guys!

Musicians have been inspired by the romance of R & J, even into the rock era, although it was really just the names that were invoked rather than the story itself. Dire Straits’ version of a modern pair of lovers has become a standard, yielding numerous covers. Here are two takes: the original from Mark Knopfler and the boys, as well as Amy Ray performing the more muscular Indigo Girls version.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkfotbNqQgw

If Dire Straits’ street song serenade is too soft for you, then turn to Lou Reed’s tribute to the lovers in near apocalyptic 1980s NYC:

Too harsh? Then let’s shift back to the 1950s, for something infectious from The Reflections, about a couple who are “Just Like Romeo and Juliet.”

And gosh darn it: looks like that cutie Taylor Swift had to read Romeo and Juliet in school, leading her to write “Love Story.” It appears, however, that she never finished the play, since her retelling is a wholly happy one. The video director may not have read the play either – the art direction makes the story more like a cross between Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights. But changing the period is done all the time in full versions, so I shouldn’t kvetch.

Many accounts of the current Broadway Romeo, Orlando Bloom, take note his modern, hip costuming, so one can’t help but imagine that director David Leveaux shares my affection for the minor hit “No Myth” by Michael Penn and its refrain, “What if I was Romeo in black jeans? What if I was Heathcliff, it’s no myth.”

I’d like to cap off our tribute to the doomed duo on a classy note, with a selection from Elvis Costello’s collaboration with the classical Brodsky Quartet, “The Juliet Letters,” suggested by the many young women who to this day leave letters for Juliet in present day Verona. This is one of my favorites from the album, “Taking My Life In Your Hands.”

P.S. What about West Side Story, I hear you cry. Yes, we all know it was suggested by Romeo and Juliet. I didn’t think you needed a reminder.

Macbeth. Twelfth Night. Richard III. Romeo and Juliet. No Man’s Land. Waiting For Godot. Betrayal. The Winslow Boy.

The syllabus for a university survey course in drama? No. Instead, it’s the roster of eight of the 16 titles scheduled to open on Broadway between now and the end of 2013.

To be sure, British plays, artists and productions haven’t ever been strangers to Broadway, but this preponderance of works – featuring actors such as Jude Law, Mark Rylance, Rachel Weisz, Daniel Craig, Anne-Marie Duff, Stephen Fry, Orlando Bloom, Roger Rees, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart – in the 40 theatres that comprise Broadway, all at the same time, is an embarrassment of riches. Add in concurrent Off-Broadway productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with David Harewood and Kathryn Hunter (opening the new Theatre for a New Audience space in Brooklyn) and Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins in All That Fall, and it appears that Anglophilia is running rampant in the playhouses of New York.

Much of this is coincidence, since it’s not as if producers conspire on themes. Indeed, from a marketing standpoint, it’s not necessarily even a good idea, since the theatregoers most drawn to this work may have to face some tough buying decisions unless they have unlimited resources and time. Cultural tourists won’t even be able to fit all of these terrific sounding shows in, should they fly to the city for merely a long weekend.

But whether the productions are transfers from the UK or newly minted in America, as is the case with No Man’s Land, Romeo and Juliet, and Betrayal, the British imprimatur seems as if it’s a requirement this year, even if only in part. UK director David Leveaux is staging Romeo and Juliet with a North American cast capped by Bloom. US director Julie Taymor tapped Harewood and Hunter for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, her first project since the highly-publicised and contentious Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark (a tell-all book by her collaborator Glen Berger will be released just as Midsummer performances begin). Even the US classic The Glass Menagerie is being helmed by John Doyle. Only Classic Stage Company’s Romeo and Juliet, with Elizabeth Olsen and TR Knight, is wholly comprised of American artists, though their Romeo is Japan-born.

The English theatre can certainly take pride in this abundance of talent exported to American shores, and I look forward to each and every one of these shows enthusiastically. Indeed, I’ll pass on my annual autumn trip to London since I’ll need only take the subway and not British Airways.

But it does beg the question of whether classical work can succeed on Broadway without a UK connection. Are producers giving up on our best American actors and directors taking on British and Irish pieces without at least some of that heritage in the shows’ DNA? To be sure, not-for-profit companies may lean American overall (LCT’s Macbeth is Ethan Hawke), but has public television conditioned us to desire the “genuine” article? Great American plays appear on British stages frequently, ranging from A View From The Bridge to Fences to Clybourne Park, without the perpetual need to import Americans, let alone the cream of American talent, to make them work. Yet the power of UK casting appears to be such that even multiple Macbeths are deemed economically viable, with Alan Cumming having played virtually all of the roles on Broadway only months ago and Kenneth Branagh due at the Park Avenue Armory in June 2014.

I don’t like calling attention to national divisions when it comes to art, but the fall theatre season in New York simply can’t be overlooked. Despite the luxury of all of the great theatre on tap, the timing sends the message to US actors, theatre students, critics and audiences that when it comes to staging foreign classics, the talent exchange flows more strongly from west to east than in the other direction.

But looking on the bright side, perhaps this means we’ll soon enjoy one more benefit of the English stage, and be able to buy ice cream at the interval.