The Theatre Times: In February I caught Antonio Syxty’s staging of Romeo e Giulietta (Romeo and Juliet) at Milan’s Leonardo Theatre in a production by Manifatture Teatrali Milanesi. Syxty’s interpretation, which puts onstage nearly all the original script, has a three-hours running time, with no interval. This means the five acts are left almost intact, notable exceptions being the absence of some characters, such as Lord and Lady Montague, Peter, the Musicians and Citizens.
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I personally think that Romeo and Juliet has been done enough times recently. Sure, it is a legendary play and has been done for centuries and centuries, but I feel like especially recently in the past two or so years there has been a huge uptick in productions. I also feel like every single one of these productions brand themselves as “new” and “never seen before”. A “refreshing take” for “today’s teenagers”. “Innovative”— as this article says in the title. However, I feel like every production claims this, and then they all produce a similar production with modern-ish grunge clothing and minimalist scenic design where they just make Juliet a little bit more badass. Well, some of them do lean into and succeed in this feminist framing, it is hardly something that I find “new”, as quite literally everyone and their uncle is doing this. This production does not sound any different than any of these, except for maybe the fact that it is made even more boring by having a “three-hour running time with no interval”. Not that I’m saying Shakespeare is boring, but rather the fact that you would be hard-pressed to find me sitting in a theatre for three hours with no break for ANYTHING. Maybe Taylor Swift. But that’s definitely it. I do, however, wonder if maybe this is just something that has been overdone recently in the US, and if a production like this is relatively new in Italia, as this article makes it seem. Or if the article is just being written to be written, because I really was not convinced by this writing that it would be a production worth my time.
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