Verily, Are the Kids All Right?

A Romeo and Juliet production that's all (vape) smoke and shimmer.

- SARA HOLDREN

ROMEO JULIET DIRECTED BY SAM GOLD. CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE.

WHEN SAM GOLD's new production of Romeo and Juliet, starring PYTs Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, was announced in April, the PR team came in hot. "THE YOUTH ARE F**KED," shouted all the marketing materials in a color scheme that Charli XCX might sign off on. The Gen-Z coding was blatant, and at the same time, the production styled its title Romeo + Juliet, apparently trying to rope in people who wept into their popcorn at the Baz Luhrmann movie while many Brat Summer revelers were pre-utero. Bleachers' Jack Antonoff would be writing music; in a promotional music video, Connor and Zegler tried on silly sunglasses and played with stuffed animals; the whole cast was hot and young and looked like they could tell you about your star chart. Where was Shakespeare in all this? Did it matter?

Marketing is marketing, and it might not have mattered then, but it certainly does now that you can see all this highkey, try-hard set dressing clogging up Circle in the Square. At the center of the whole trendy, clubby jumble is, as Cordelia once said to her dad, nothing.

One could be forgiven for walking away from this show's two (and a half) hours' traffic thinking that maybe Romeo and Juliet is kind of mid after all. Such is the enervating effect of so clickbait-y and uncurious a production.