The brand new musical movie Juliet and Romeo arrives on display screen with lavish visuals, saccharine pop songs and a transformed Shakespearean plot that tries to dazzle. With its brilliant color palette and dreamy masquerade aesthetic, that is Verona as filtered via a Eurovision lens: glittering, melodramatic and ceaselessly overwrought.
Creator and director Timothy Scott Bogart and composer Evan Kidd sign up for a lineage of Romeo and Juliet variations that mix track with spectacle. Who may just fail to remember Harold Perrineau’s drag rendition of Younger Hearts Run Loose as Mercutio in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996)? Extra not too long ago, the level display & Juliet (2019) used the long-lasting songwriting of Max Martin for a jukebox musical meets feminist retelling of the tragedy. So the place does Juliet and Romeo fall when put next?
Let’s start with the honest, sooner than turning to the foul. Shot on location in the actual Verona, Juliet and Romeo makes superb use of its surroundings, with ingenious units and artful staging that breathe some power into its international.
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Verona’s jewel tones, candlelit boulevard events and unending twisting streets grant the movie its fairytale high quality. There’s a tactile richness to the manufacturing design that on occasion feels immersive, evoking a heightened international someplace between Shakespeare’s imagined Verona and a fragrance ad. The array of combat, dance, and crowd scenes are well-choreographed and the digicam steadily strikes with an full of life theatricality that hints at what the musical will have been.
Sadly, the track doesn’t stay tempo. Whilst the pop soundtrack is relentlessly inoffensive – assume bubblegum ballads and tool choruses – it lacks the lyrical chunk or emotional weight had to maintain a tragedy.
With sugary harmonies and banal lyrics, those numbers evoke extra Eurovision than Elizabethan drama – now not inherently a foul factor, however on this case, it leads to emotional flatness. For instance, a bunch like Higher Than This, led with verve by means of Martina Ortiz Luis as Veronica, stands proud relatively with its fascinating melody and completely happy choreography. It’s a second of brightness that in brief lifts the power. However even that slips into the entire sameness of the ranking. At its easiest, the track is cutesy; at its worst, it’s filler.
The trailer for Juliet & Romeo.
The nature paintings is in a similar way asymmetric. Juliet (Clara Rugaard) emerges as essentially the most compelling determine – wry, self-aware, and performed with simply sufficient spunk to keep away from cliché. Romeo (Jamie Ward), in contrast, is a forgettable boy-band archetype, rebelling weakly in opposition to a domineering father (Jason Isaacs channelling medieval Lucius Malfoy) and contributing little past brooding attraction.
Derek Jacobi’s gravitas is squandered on narration and taking part in the hapless Friar Lawrence. Juliet and Romeo opens with a flurry of ancient exposition delivered by means of Jacobi: medieval Italy, papal politics, the splintering of city-states, and the specter of “mighty Rome” coming for Verona. It’s an bold – if useless – reframing that units up a late-stage twist that gestures towards a sequel.
The supporting forged may be a mixture of intriguing alternatives and tonal confusion. Mercutio’s (Nicholas Podany) subplot, involving his personal forbidden love and disturbing dating with an adoptive Montague patriarch, hints at deeper parallels to the central couple, however is rarely absolutely advanced. The apothecary (Dan Fogler), bafflingly, will get a solo about alchemical experiments that feels lifted from a mid-tier Disney sequel. In the meantime, the nurse (Sara Lazzaro), most often a comedic gem, is stripped of humour completely.
The Masks I Put on from Juliet & Romeo.
A standout quantity comes from Rise up Wilson’s Girl Capulet and Verona’s ladies, who lament in The Masks I Put on in regards to the constraints of femininity in well-arranged team spirit. But the music’s emotional resonance is blunted by means of underwritten personality arcs. The ladies sing superbly, however we slightly know why they’re offended.
After all, Juliet and Romeo is a musical that lines to be significant however by no means earns its emotional crescendos. It gestures towards political intrigue, feminist revision and star-crossed romance, however settles for spectacle. Nonetheless, with its glowing visuals and shiny ranking, for fanatics of unapologetic musical fanfare, there’s some pleasure to be discovered within the glitter.
