TT: Clueless in Verona

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two of this year’s Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival productions, Romeo and Juliet and Love’s Labour’s Lost. Here’s an excerpt.
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If any Shakespeare play is in need of a nice long vacation, it’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Everybody knows it–or pretends to–and so any company that dares to revive it must find a way to make it new. What’s more, “Romeo and Juliet” is done so often that many of the most logical approaches to freshening the play’s familiarities are themselves in danger of becoming creaky clichés….
“Romeo and Juliet,” however, turns out to be an infinitely renewable artistic resource. If you cast it right, act it straight and stage it as though it really were new, the miracle will repeat itself for the millionth time–as it does in Christopher V. Edwards’ thoroughly satisfying Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival version. This is, to be sure, a conceptual production, but the concept is both simple and sensible: Mr. Edwards has staged the first half of “R & J” in the light-hearted manner of a teen-flick romcom, stripping away the portentous foreshadowing and playing the plot for laughs. Romeo (Carl Howell) is charmingly callow, Juliet (Angela Janas) gawky and eager, and they haven’t the slightest idea of what they’re getting into….
It’s easy to forget that the world is full of people who have yet to see any Shakespeare play. Were such a benighted soul placed in my charge, Hudson Valley’s “Romeo and Juliet” might well be our first stop, after which we’d come back the next night for Terrence O’Brien’s superlative production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” Mr. O’Brien, Hudson Valley’s artistic director, has a knack for staging Shakespeare’s “problem” plays so deftly that you come away wondering why anyone ever found them difficult. That’s what happens here.
“Love’s Labour’s Lost” is the most extravagantly artificial of Shakespeare’s comedies, a pun-encrusted farrago of frenetic wordplay that lacks the emotional immediacy of his better-known plays. To make it work, the director must keep the top of verbal virtuosity spinning at all times, which can leave the viewer exhausted. Not so this time around. Mr. O’Brien never lets us forget that “Love’s Labour’s Lost” is ultimately about love, not wit….
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Read the whole thing here.