Romeo and Juliet

Reviewed by Bill Raden
West LA VA Grounds, Japanese Garden
Through July 26, 2014

Photo by Michael Lamont

The key to any Romeo and Juliet worth its salt — or any great love story, for which Shakespeare’s star-crossed teenagers provide the template — is understanding that the real romance driving the play is a triangle that always includes the audience.

Which is to say that if we aren’t as swept away by the two young lovers as they are by each other, rather than a tale of love “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,” the play is reduced to a somewhat clinical if poetic account of the unpleasantness that can result when the hot heads of adolescence get crossed with overactive hormones.

Director Kenn Sabberton’s handsome al fresco production for the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles is bi-racially cast in a 1920s-dress staging. Though that critical chemistry between audience and actors is found in abundance, it rarely emanates from the production’s eponymous lovers.

Jack Mikesell’s Romeo and Christina Elmore’a Juliet click insofar as bringing the requisite clarity to the Bard’s language — a level of translucency that is achieved by the entire ensemble. But that click never seems to spark anything truly combustive. For a play in which any character’s lovability is at least partly determined by the agility of their wit, this Romeo and Juliet rarely hold a candle to the mercurial flamboyance of Gregory Linington’s razor-edged Mercutio or to the endearing bawdiness of Kimberly Scott as Juliet’s Nurse.

Part of the problem may be that Sabberton’s sumptuous Jazz Age overlay, which is used to greatest effect in a Charleston number at the Capulet ball, somehow upstages that scene’s delicate interplay of flirtatious rapture in Romeo and Juliet’s pivotal if brief first meeting.

It also doesn’t entirely track for the rest of the play. Though it looks gorgeous, costume designer Holly Poe Durbin’s collection of boaters, spectators, double-breasted suits and fringed flapper dresses makes no allowance for the Renaissance rapiers needed to dispatch both Mercutio and Tybalt (Christopher Michael Rivera) less awkwardly than is achieved here.

And while the wonderful Tracey A. Leigh turns her Lady Capulet into a plaintively moving portrait of the emotional sacrifice implicit in an arranged marriage to a man of stolid ambition like Elijah Alexander’s Lord Capulet, such standouts can’t compensate for the romantic lift needed to make the tragedy soar.

 Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles at the Japanese Garden, Graeter Los Angeles VA Healthcare Campus, 11301 Wilshire Blvd., Brentwood: Tues.-Sun., 3 p.m.; through July 26. (213) 893-8293, shakespearecenter.org