Theater Review: Romeo and Juliet

As Romeo and Juliet Dan Shapira and Nelly Tagar are eager, charming and exuberant kids, but they need to expand, grow up a bit, when reality hits, and they don’t.

By HELEN KAYE
Director Noam Shmuel's production of Romeo and Juliet absolutely works on its own terms. The Capulets and the Montagues in this R&J are contemporary feuding crime families.
They are at home on Zeev Levi’s geometrical, featureless set, their actions complemented by Nimrod Zin’s striking video work.
There are dazzling moments, such as the stylized choreographies of the initial street fight and of the dancing at the Capulet ball, an elegant balcony scene.
And yet there’s little behind the gimmicks and the concept. The whole point is that Shakespeare’s 400 year old love story still transcends its time, and a production of it needs to touch that transcendence.
This one does not. It stays on the surface, and it need not because even crime families, however loathsome their way of life, have more or less the same human responses to events.
As Romeo and Juliet Dan Shapira and Nelly Tagar are eager, charming and exuberant kids, but they need to expand, grow up a bit, when reality hits, and they don’t. Yoav Levy's Mercutio is sturdy, a man who enjoys life and who faces death with horror.
Arye Moskuna invests Old Capulet with necessary menace while Ziv Zohar Meir is coldly efficient as Paris. As Juliet's Nurse, Rosina Cambos deservedly steals every scene she’s in. Perhaps it’s because her raunchy, chatty, devoted servant has a touch of that needed depth.