Romeo and Juliet (Play)

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    Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler Revive ‘Romeo + Juliet’ for a TikTok Generation

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    Who can forget the classic first line of “Romeo and Juliet”: “How y’all doin’ today?”Well, perhaps not so classic. But as uttered at the start of the play’s 36th Broadway revival, which opened Thursday at Circle in the Square, the words are certainly more welcoming to the production’s youthful target audience than the traditional iambic pentameter ones: “Two households, both alike in dignity.”Not that there are two households in the director Sam Gold’s rec-room adaptation anyway. Romeo’s parents, along with a clutch of other characters, have been discarded. Juliet’s are both played by one actor, with little more than a change of inflection. And though Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler, the box-office draws, cover just one star-crossed lover each — he a beagly Romeo, she a beamish Juliet — the other eight cast members take on 17 roles, adorably if often indistinguishably. It’s a puppy pile.But before you wonder whether this production was sponsored by CliffsNotes, with only as much poetry and staying power as an Instagram story, bear in mind that many of the characters are teenagers, and that the play may most usefully be directed at people seeing it for the first time, not the 36th. Certainly Gold has used everything in his formidable toolbox — scissors, hammers, punches, wrenches — to get young people interested in a world that looks more like theirs than Elizabethan London or Renaissance Verona.So after an energetic preshow, filled with flirting, peacocking and snits of aggression, the story begins with that casual greeting from Gabby Beans, the play’s Chorus. Beans, later a hotheaded Mercutio, a beneficent Friar Lawrence and a barely there Prince Escalus, makes a relatable hype woman, introducing the rest of the cast by first name and telling us whom they’ll be playing. If you’re confused — and even a frequent flier might be — you can consult a program insert that visualizes the Montagues and Capulets as a mood board.Feeling the groove: Gabby Beans, far right, leading Tommy Dorfman (center), Kit Connor (far back) and other cast members in a dance in Sam Gold’s “Romeo + Juliet” at Circle in the Square.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler Are Star Crossed in Central Park

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      On a morning in mid-August, a breeze stirred Central Park’s midsummer leaves. Children skipped, dogs lolloped, a bunny peeked out from a hedge near the Great Lawn while a nearby saxophone ruined “Isn’t She Lovely.” It was a very nice day to fall in love.The actors Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler were there, hiking up to Belvedere Castle and then down to the Shakespeare Garden. Connor, 20, and Zegler, 23, don’t plan to fall in love. But the next day, at rehearsal, in Brooklyn they would discover how to make the characters they play fall desperately, terribly in love.As the stars of the “Romeo + Juliet” that opens on Broadway on Oct. 24, they will die for love, they will die for each other, eight times a week. Both are making their Broadway debuts and both have the not exactly enviable task of making a 16th-century play with (apologies for centuries-old spoilers) a famously grim ending feel breath-catchingly new and vital.Daunting? Not at all.“It should be fun,” Connor said, not without some anxiety. Zegler gave him a sardonic look. “It will be fun,” he said. Connor, a British star of the Netflix teen romance “Heartstopper,” and Zegler, an American who made a thrilling film debut in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” had never met until March, shortly after they each agreed to star in the revival, dreamed up by the Tony-winning director Sam Gold, with music by Jack Antonoff. They had been offered the roles separately, without the benefit of a chemistry read. That spring day, Gold brought them to Circle in the Square Theater, where previews will start Sept. 26, then bought them cups of coffee at the Cosmic Diner.Kit Connor, right, on the Netflix series “Heartstopper” opposite Joe Locke.Teddy Cavendish/NetflixWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yesterday’s Broadway Warhorses, Saddled With Today’s Concerns

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      Revivals of “Romeo and Juliet,” “Our Town,” “Gypsy” and “Sunset Boulevard” aim to show that rethinking for the present is what makes classics classic.Two cheers for new voices! Of the 16 productions scheduled to open on Broadway between now and the end of the year, 12 are new to the Boulevard of Broken Budgets.But I’d like to reserve a third cheer for the fall’s four revivals, which may get less attention, having been this way before, but are likely to earn their keep if history holds true. Old voices are, after all, where new voices come from. And though 240 years separate the Broadway debuts of “Romeo and Juliet” and “Sunset Boulevard,” with “Our Town” and “Gypsy” in between, they all have much in common, at least in their continued haunting of theatergoers’ imaginations.That haunting arises, in part, from our memories of past stars who hover alongside the new ones. In “Our Town,” Henry Fonda and Paul Newman will be whispering the Stage Manager’s lines to Jim Parsons. Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury and Patti LuPone will no doubt watch over Audra McDonald as she takes on the role of Rose in “Gypsy.” LuPone will also be looking over Nicole Scherzinger’s shoulder in “Sunset Boulevard”; presumably keeping a safe distance, so will Glenn Close. And though few are likely to remember Robert Goffe, the original Juliet, he too will be felt on Broadway this fall. However long ago, the part was built on him.But revivals of shows like these have more to offer than ghosts. There’s a reason, aside from name recognition, that they keep coming back. Though products of vastly different times and cultures, they dig so deep into their specific truths that they reach a common, eternal one, from which many others may spring.Perhaps that’s most evident in “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play about two families whose ordinary life events, from birth to death, are consecrated by a kind of communal love. The director Kenny Leon said that in his production, “1936 runs into 2024,” allowing the story to serve “as a metaphor for our world, for our country, even our time.”Paul Newman in a 2002 production of “Our Town.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHenry Fonda in a 1969 production of “Our Town.”Everett CollectionWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      My Midsummer Dream: 7 Plays, 5 Days, 4 Stages, 1 Story

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      At the Stratford Festival, a remix of genders and genres tells a brand-new, age-old tale of personal freedom.Walking the streets of this almost-too-charming town along the I-kid-you-not Avon River, I’ve often had the experience of hearing voices in my head.I am but mad north-northwest, as Hamlet would have it. After all, at the Stratford Festival, 400 miles in that direction from my usual haunts, internal voices are utterly normal, the result of seeing, cheek by jowl, so many new productions. After you see two or three, they start a conversation, sometimes delighting in what they have in common and sometimes arguing about what they don’t.During a visit in July, those voices were louder than ever. The five plays and two musicals I caught in five days on four stages were not just conversing but collaborating, seeming to scribble in one another’s scripts. “Twelfth Night” wrote part of “La Cage aux Folles.” “Something Rotten” cribbed “Romeo and Juliet.” “Hedda Gabler” and “The Goat” drank from the same bloody fountain.And “Cymbeline”? Well, that little-loved Shakespeare once again proved to be mad on its own.The clash and coupling of such seemingly different works is the great value, and great pleasure, of the repertory system, one so difficult to sustain that few theaters bother anymore. Stratford is by every measure — budget, employment, attendance, production — the largest repertory theater in North America, and likely the largest nonprofit theater, period.Also the broadest. Where else could you take in so easily a program so diverse, by genre, era, style and origin? Indeed, if you hit the right part of the season, which this year began on April 16 and runs through Nov. 17, you could theoretically see all 12 shows in one week.That efficiency wouldn’t matter unless the shows were good; in some years, that’s all they are, and that’s enough. But this year, both in scope and quality, Stratford outdid itself, with a thrilling “Goat” and “Gabler,” a delightful “Cage” and “Rotten” and a scintillating “Twelfth Night.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler Headline Broadway ‘Romeo and Juliet’

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      A production featuring the screen stars, with music by Jack Antonoff, will open in October at Circle in the Square.Rachel Zegler has already played a Juliet-inspired figure, starring as Maria in the 2021 film adaptation of “West Side Story.” And Kit Connor has played a Romeo of sorts, starring as a yearning adolescent in the boy-meets-boy television series “Heartstopper.”Now the two actors are bringing a new production of “Romeo and Juliet” to Broadway. Their version, which seems to be leaning into the alienation of youth in a world of violent adults, is to begin performances Sept. 26 and to open Oct. 24 at Circle in the Square Theater.The production, which announced its timing and location on Wednesday, has said little about its concept, but there are indications it will be influenced by contemporary ideas: The show is to feature music by Jack Antonoff, the Grammy-winning producer best known for his successful collaborations with Taylor Swift, and it is being marketed with a vulgarity about the plight of young people. On Wednesday, the show released a video of Zegler and Connor, in contemporary clothing and setting, flirting and dancing to a song from Bleachers, which is Antonoff’s band.“Romeo and Juliet” is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, and this will be its 37th production on Broadway, according to the Internet Broadway Database. This production is to be directed by Sam Gold, a Tony winner for “Fun Home” who has previously directed Broadway productions of “Macbeth” and “King Lear” and who is directing this season’s revival of “An Enemy of the People.” Sonya Tayeh, the Tony-winning choreographer of “Moulin Rouge!”, will add a dancer’s sensibility to the production; she is being credited with “movement.”This revival, first announced last month, is being produced by Seaview, an increasingly prolific production company founded by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea and partially owned by Sony Music Masterworks. More

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      ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Review: Toheeb Jimoh Shines

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      Toheeb Jimoh, Emmy-nominated for “Ted Lasso,” takes on Romeo in a riveting production from the British director Rebecca Frecknall.“Is love a tender thing?” Romeo asks early in the Shakespeare tragedy to which he and Juliet give their names. Not so much, according to the raw and riveting new production of “Romeo and Juliet” that opened Wednesday at the Almeida Theater here.It’s no surprise that the courtship between the noble Romeo — here played by the sweet-faced Toheeb Jimoh, from TV’s “Ted Lasso” — and the teenage Juliet will end in calamity. But this production from Rebecca Frecknall — the buzzy British director whose shows tend to scoop up Olivier awards — treats the often overly familiar play as if it were entirely fresh, and the result is astonishing.Filleting the text by nearly an hour so that it actually does equate to the Chorus’s promised “two hours’ traffic of our stage,” Frecknall brings to her first professional foray into Shakespeare the same pared-back, scalpel-sharp precision she has previously applied to Tennessee Williams and her still-running West End revival of “Cabaret,” which is rumored to be heading to New York next spring.Her “Romeo and Juliet,” performed without an intermission, begins with the cast clawing feverishly at a stage wall, onto which are projected crucial lines from the prologue. But as if in haste to get straight to the meat of the play, the wall soon collapses to reveal the citizenry of Verona mid-combat. Danger, you feel from the start, is the default mode of a contemporary-seeming milieu amid which Juliet is described by her father as “a stranger in the world.” That is perhaps because she hasn’t yet experienced life’s abrasions; such an awareness will come — and how — with time.“These violent delights have violent ends,” notes Friar Lawrence (the excellent Paul Higgins), in arguably the most prescient remark in the play. Barely have Romeo and Juliet been introduced before their existence seems threatened at every turn. At one point the Nurse (a booted Jo McInnes, herself a fine director) sits with her face in her hands, fearing the worst.Rebecca Frecknall, the play’s director, has a background in movement, and her “Romeo and Juliet” often feels halfway toward dance-theater.Marc BrennerElsewhere, Juliet’s father remarks to his daughter’s intended, Paris, that “we were born to die”— a comment that in this context has the force of prophecy. Jamie Ballard brings to Lord Capulet a roiling fury that seems to catch even his own wife off guard. What sort of father would deride his only child as “one too much?”Amid such a toxic family, you can well imagine Juliet wanting the quickest way out, and Frecknall makes us aware of how the play is alive to the passage of time. “Wednesday’s tomorrow,” the Friar says in passing, noting a remorseless speed that seems to take everyone by surprise. The Friar is equally alert to the danger inherent in such impetuosity: “They stumble that run fast,” he cautions as the lovers hurtle toward the abyss.Frecknall has a background in movement, and her “Romeo and Juliet” often feels halfway toward dance-theater, including generous borrowings from Prokofiev’s celebrated ballet score for this very play.A male ensemble, including key characters like Benvolio (Miles Barrow) and Jyuddah Jaymes’s feral Tybalt, moves in undulating rhythms, dropping to the floor of Chloe Lamford’s set and back up again. Jonathan Holby’s fight direction introduces a gun into the arsenal of knives that does away with Jack Riddiford’s charismatic Mercutio, here an insolent provocateur who has barely spoken the Queen Mab speech before he disappears. The rules governing this fearsome group of men render no one safe amid the comparably merciless glare of Lee Curran’s shifting bank of lights toward the rear of the stage.The fast-rising Jimoh, a 2022 Emmy nominee, brings to the stage the same ready likability familiar from his turn as Sam Obisanya in “Ted Lasso.” What astonishes here is the ease with which he emotionally opens himself up to Juliet, only to realize too late that the options available to this couple are running out. It’s fascinating, too, to see the balcony scene reconfigured so that Romeo is perched atop a ladder addressing Juliet center-stage, flipping the play’s iconic imagery.Jimoh brings the same ready likability to the stage that earned him an Emmy nomination last year for his role in the TV show “Ted Lasso.” Marc BrennerReferencing “this world-wearied flesh,” Jimoh’s Romeo sounds like an embryonic Hamlet. Hainsworth, for her part, played Hermia, a young lover with a similarly unforgiving father in the Bridge Theater’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” several years ago. Juliet is a far larger role, and the actress sometimes disappears so far inside her character’s grief that the language itself gets muddied, or lost. (Hainsworth will reunite with Frecknall in an adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba” for the National Theater in November.)But I’ve rarely heard an audience as attentive as the Almeida’s was when Hainsworth’s guttural sorrow gave way to a startlingly vivid suicide, from which several playgoers around me visibly recoiled.You may not be surprised to learn that Frecknall closes the play with Juliet’s despairing deed. Once you’ve restored death’s sting, all that’s left is silence.Romeo and JulietThrough July 29 at the Almeida Theater in London; https://almeida.co.uk/ More

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      Review: A ‘Romeo and Juliet’ That Clowns Around With Tragedy

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      Directed by Hansol Jung and Dustin Wills, this sportive, vividly acted production fails to make a convincing case for its new gags and directorial flights.“Romeo and Juliet” is at its core a cautionary tale of young love: Kiss a boy at a party one day, marry him the next, inside of a week you’re both dead. Of Shakespeare’s tragedies it is more propulsive than most, funnier and more modern, too, an amalgam of sex and death and a masquerade ball that requires little improvement. Cast a couple of charismatic leads, wind them up and let the bodies fall.That doesn’t mean that playwrights and directors shouldn’t interrogate or adapt the text. Of course they should. But what’s puzzling about the “Romeo and Juliet” presented by the National Asian American Theater Company in partnership with Two River Theater is how little any of that adaptation adds.Directed by Hansol Jung and Dustin Wills, who recently collaborated on “Wolf Play” at Soho Rep, and with what’s billed as a “modern verse translation” by Jung, this is a sportive, vividly acted production that fails to make a convincing case for its many directorial flights and vernacular interventions. Jung and Wills have thrown much spaghetti at the “Romeo and Juliet” wall. The result is a lot of noodling around.At 136 East 13th Street, usually the home of the Classic Stage Company, the set, designed by Junghyun Georgia Lee and lit by Joey Moro, is a wooden circle. This gestures toward the Elizabethan, as do Mariko Ohigashi’s costumes, which combine long skirts and slashed doublets with T-shirts and jeans.Jung’s script walks this same line between early modern and contemporary, leaving some tranches of the play intact, but zhuzhing up other parts with new vocabulary and new jokes. In the first scene, for example, the prologue is delivered more or less intact, minus a “doth” here and there. Yet the first line of dialogue is “I swear, man, we can’t be no one’s suckers,” which leads into some very filthy puns. (Are they bad puns? Yes. But so are Shakespeare’s.)Brian Lee Huynh as Capulet and Daniel Liu as Lady Capulet.Julieta CervantesJung’s interpolations are perhaps an improvement on the real first lines — an elaborate play on “collier” and “choler” — though specificity of acting and direction would have put the language across. And some of the substitutions, like “thrilled” for “proud,” are even less necessary. Still, Jung is savvy enough to respect Shakespeare’s rhythms and to match his word play, so there’s pleasure in seeing her lively mind volley with his.The acting, from Major Curda’s sad boy Romeo to Dorcas Leung’s sweetheart Juliet to Mia Katigbak’s warm, blunt Nurse, is uniformly strong. (Daniel Liu, playing a servant and Lady Capulet, is an actor to keep an eye on.) As actors of Asian descent don’t always get equal opportunities to play classical roles, this alone justifies the production. Jung and Wills’s direction doesn’t always serve them, though. It’s broad and busy, inclined toward clowning and with a habit of brazening out every sex joke. There are Brechtian gestures and live looping and Groucho Marx glasses and plastic fish littering the stage, which rob the story of momentum. Tybalt (Rob Kellogg), at one point, does the worm. Tragedy recedes.Yet if you are or can remember being young and possessed of big, ungovernable feelings, “Romeo and Juliet” won’t seem far away to you. Making the language and the dancing and the streetwear mirror our own time hasn’t brought it any closer.Romeo and JulietThrough June 3 at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater, Manhattan; naatco.org. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Rosaline’ Review: O Romeo, Romeo, Thank U, Next

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      Kaitlyn Dever plays Romeo’s snarky ex-lover in this Shakespeare reimagining, which crosses its source material with present-day sensibilities.For never was a story of more woe than this — and I’m not talking about the trysts of Romeo. “Rosaline,” Karen Maine’s hapless Shakespeare reimagining, stages history’s most famous romance from the novel perspective of Rosaline, Romeo’s jilted ex. It’s a clever enough gimmick. But in playing out the reverie, the movie epitomizes a du jour Hollywood adaptation style that’s nothing short of agonizing, planting one foot in the source material and the other in a cheeky 21st-century sensibility.Like other half-modernized classic works, “Rosaline” strands its irreverent millennial characters in a stuffy olde world. Think “Enchanted” in reverse: Clad in opulent chemises, bodices and waistcoats, Rosaline (Kaitlyn Dever) whines, cusses and flails through Verona, egged on in her diablerie by her world-weary nurse (Minnie Driver) and sassy sidekick, Paris (Spencer Stevenson). When Romeo (Kyle Allen), Rosaline’s then-paramour, tries to woo her with blank verse, she squints and cuts in, “Why are you talking like that?” The engine of this movie is snark, and Dever, overtaxed with carrying the comedy, brings a dauntlessness to the role, even during more daft moments.Romeo snubs Rosaline for Juliet (Isabela Merced). Paris proposes. The Montagues clash with the Capulets. You know much of the rest, though Rosaline’s courtship with a local hunk named Dario (Sean Teale) and a puerile, eager-to-please third act are some of the movie’s bigger breaks with tradition. Shall I compare the screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (“(500) Days of Summer”) to the Bard? I’d rather not.RosalineRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Romeo & Juliet’ Review: Older, Gentler Star-Crossed Lovers

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      With age-blind casting at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, two actors who have been married for 38 years play the teenage leads.GARRISON, N.Y. — A romance and a love story are two different things. In art, we’re not great at differentiating.Take “Romeo and Juliet,” a corpse-ridden romantic tragedy routinely mistaken for a tale of deepest love, even though the lovers are teenagers who’ve only just met — people who, despite their ferocious infatuation, would absolutely flunk a quiz about each other’s likes and dislikes, dreams and histories.They’re passionate, sure; isn’t everyone at that age? But the rash young people in “Romeo and Juliet,” both the title characters and some of their friends, die from their own impetuosity. They’re not old enough to know better than to kill one another in anger in the street, or agree to a harebrained plan that involves faking one’s own death and being interred in a real tomb.Gaye Taylor Upchurch’s staging — which opened on Friday night at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s new 98-acre riverside site, under the canopy of its familiar tent — presents the tragedy as a love story, with a twist. Romeo and Juliet are played by festival regulars Kurt Rhoads and Nance Williamson, actors who have been married for 38 years and done 68 previous shows together. Upon which background, apparently, the central idea of this production mistakenly depends.“With Kurt and Nance in the title roles,” Upchurch writes in a program note, using an ampersand as her production’s title does, “we get to take it for granted that Romeo & Juliet truly love each other.”Even if we could, and I don’t believe we can, that assumption wouldn’t be terribly helpful to a drama that’s driven by the urgency of fresh desire yet played here with the languor of long acquaintance, as if guided by Friar Laurence’s admonition to “love moderately.” And so the sparking attraction between Romeo and Juliet ignites not a raging conflagration but a glowing ember — warmth, not heat.The fault isn’t in the chronologically incongruous casting; audiences are sophisticated enough not to bat an eye at the actors’ ages. And in a summer when Ian McKellen is returning again to the title role in “Hamlet,” which he last played onstage a year ago, at 82, other well-seasoned actors might also want to take their shots at interpreting Shakespearean youths.Upchurch’s elegant interspersing of ethereal choral music by Heather Christian is one of this production’s most alluring features, along with costumes in eye-popping patterns by Enver Chakartash. But Upchurch hasn’t built a frame or puzzled out a conceit that supports her age-blind casting. The idea feels forced, not organic — grasping for meaning rather than providing it.Romeo and Juliet, adolescents still under their parents’ roofs, take drastic measures to wrest control of their lives and futures. But the even-keeled Rhoads and Williamson imbue these teens with none of the tidal-wave emotions that make them idealistic enough to defy their families’ hatred for one another, and heedless enough not to pause for rational thought.Without that palpable, desperate, cocktail-of-hormones recklessness, their actions make no sense. And if we don’t believe the characters, the play loses its stakes and its heft. As when Lady Capulet (a solid Britney Nicole Simpson) urges the almost 14-year-old Juliet to marry her suitor Paris, saying: “I was your mother much upon these years that you are now a maid.” There’s gut-punch potential in that line about girls and imposed maternity, but in the context of this wan production, it merely evaporates.Paris (Erin Despanie), though, is interesting: unusually affable, and thus uncommonly sympathetic. You feel a little bad for the guy as he innocently looks forward to his wedding. And if Kimberly Chatterjee’s appealing Friar Laurence doesn’t manage to reconcile his own honorable objective — ending the antagonism between the Capulets and the Montagues — with his deranged death-faking scheme, he is nonetheless one of the more fully inhabited characters.A hillside along the Hudson River serves as a captivating backdrop, with costumes in eye-popping patterns by Enver Chakartash.T. Charles EricksonThe tent in which this all plays out, with little more than chairs for a set, is a temporary structure nestled at the foot of a sloping hill. It’s due to be replaced nearby with a permanent open-air theater designed by Studio Gang, with Hudson River views — the sort of vista that festival goers enjoyed for decades at Hudson Valley Shakespeare’s former longtime home, on the grounds of the neighboring Boscobel House and Gardens.That backdrop is gone for now, but the customary soft sand stage floor is in place, to be traipsed across by spectators on the way to their seats. Also comfortingly unchanged: the dexterous use of the landscape outside the tent as a playing space. After mortally wounding Romeo’s friend Mercutio (Luis Quintero), Juliet’s cousin Tybalt (Zoë Goslin) runs off to the hill, where, in dramatic side lighting (by Stacey Derosier), he surveys the damage from a distance. Upchurch does well with such tableaus.Covid-19 cases in the company delayed the opening night of this “Romeo & Juliet.” Even when it arrived, two actors wore face masks onstage. It’s impossible to know how much the disruption of illness might have foiled the depth of characterization in this production.But more time would not have alchemized the central elements that refuse to meld: the onstage fiction of Romeo and Juliet’s ruinous romance, and the offstage reality of two veteran actors’ devoted love.Romeo & JulietThrough Sept. 18 at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Garrison, N.Y.; hvshakespeare.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More