TT: Just like new

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on two more Shakespeare & Company productions, Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It. Here’s an excerpt.
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Is it possible for a play to be so well known that there’s no longer anything new to do with it or say about it? If so, then “Romeo and Juliet” would fill the bill with room to spare. No Shakespeare play is more widely performed or frequently adapted. It’s been filmed, parodied and turned into operas and ballets. Semi-literate people can reel off its best-known lines without thinking twice. Factor in “West Side Story” and you’ve got a recipe for saturation-level cultural omnipresence, the kind that can set a drama critic’s eyeballs to rolling.
All true–and all blessedly irrelevant to Shakespeare & Company’s “Romeo and Juliet,” a production so unhackneyed and emotionally immediate that you’ll feel as though you’re seeing that most ubiquitous of masterpieces through a first-timer’s eyes. What’s more, Daniela Varon has brought off this miracle without ladling the rancid sauce of cleverness over Shakespeare’s text. Instead she’s given us a trick-free “R & J” devoid of the slightest hint of directorial manipulation, staged with passionate simplicity and performed by a cast whose youthful spark makes it possible to take the familiar plight of the star-crossed lovers at face value….
It’s by no means an original idea to stage “Romeo and Juliet” with exceptionally young-looking players, but Ms. Varon has gone the whole hog: Susannah Millonzi, her Juliet, is tween-slight and sullenly tomboyish, while David Gelles looks as though he’d taken time off from starring in a high-school romcom to play Romeo. Once again, though, there’s nothing tricky about this approach, especially in the case of Ms. Millonzi, who burns at both ends with an intensity hot enough to make you sweat….
A production as good as this one is by definition hard to follow, and even more so when you’re following it with another play that’s almost as familiar. But no apologies need be made for Tony Simotes’ “As You Like It,” a light and lovely romp charged with festive midsummer energy. Mr. Simotes, the company’s artistic director, has chosen to set Shakespeare’s great comedy of mistaken identity and romantic reconciliation in Paris in the Twenties, and Arthur Oliver, the costume designer, takes the ball and gallops down the field, dressing the cast in a riotously colorful medley of outfits that make you wish you could put on one of your own and join in the fun….
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Read the whole thing here.