Like the pangs of romance or the pull of melodrama, adolescent angst proves timeless. Sam Gold, the director of a newly revived Romeo + Juliet on Broadway, knows this – the production, an admirably diverse, comfortably queer and aggressively zillennial version featuring original music from the pop maestro Jack Antonoff, leans hard into the text’s hot-blooded, definitively teenage impulsivity. But he doesn’t seem to trust it. Romeo + Juliet, so styled after the 1996 Baz Luhrmann film with which it shares an ultra-contemporary, lusty ethos, feels from the jump overeager to assure today’s youths that the stir-crazy teens of Verona were just like them – stressed, pressed and bursting at the seams with feeling, as told by a Netflix heartthrob (Heartstopper’s Kit Connor) and a Spielberg leading lady (West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler), both in their Broadway debuts.
Fresh off his critically acclaimed spin on Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People this spring, Gold has returned to the Circle in the Square Theatre, this time energetically styled as a cross between a cutesy arcade (stuffed teddy bears abound) and a Brooklyn rave. As viewers take their seats, the cast, dressed somewhere within the Venn diagram of Bushwick (bustiers, baggy shorts, crop tops) and Netflix high school drama (shark onesie, intense bisexual lighting) rove about the fittingly loose stage — the round, the stairs, the rafters. (Scenic design by the recently prolific collective dots, costume design by Enver Chakartash.) They grind, grope, vape, caress with the hungry, supple movements of youth, the limb tangles of a basement party.
