“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States, dissenting opinion

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.
* * *
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.

“Compassion is something individual and voluntary. You cannot compel somebody to be compassionate; nor can you be vicariously compassionate by compelling somebody else. The Good Samaritan would have lost all merit if a Roman soldier were standing by the road with a drawn sword, telling him to get on with it and look after the injured stranger.”
Enoch Powell, Still to Decide

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:

• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Jan. 8, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren’t actively prudish, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Master Class (drama, G/PG-13, not suitable for children, extended through Sept. 4, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)

IN LENOX, MASS:

• The Memory of Water (serious comedy, PG-13, some adult subject matter, closes Sept. 4, reviewed here)

IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Oklahoma! (musical, G, remounting of 2010 production, suitable for children, closes Oct. 2, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• As You Like It (Shakespeare, G/PG-13, closes Aug. 14, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN CAPE MAY, N.J.:

• The Understudy (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PETERBOROUGH, N.H.:

• Ancestral Voices (drama, G, reviewed here)

“All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”
Enoch Powell, Joseph Chamberlain

Flanders & Swann sing “A Song of Patriotic Prejudice,” from At the Drop of Another Hat, as performed on Broadway in 1967:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

No–through th’extended globe his feelings run


As broad and general as th’unbounded sun!


No narrow bigot he;–his reason’d view


Thy interests, England, ranks with thine, Peru!


France at our doors, he sees no danger nigh,


But heaves for Turkey’s woes the impartial sigh;


A steady patriot of the world alone,

The friend of every country–but his own.

George Canning, “New Morality”