Students work on all aspects of theater, including acting, crew and production. Students experience Shakespeare on the stage at a specially crafted student "informance" during the run of our productions at The Long Center for the Performing Arts. Informances include scenes with the actors and a lively question and answer session with the students.
It's a rare opportunity to interact with trained Shakespearean professionals. Per student charge; chaperone admissions are complimentary. Artistic Director. Board of Trustees. Auditions Upcoming Auditions. For Adults. In the famous tableau of the dead lovers at the end of the play, there is a third body in the room — that of Paris, who Romeo kills a few seconds before taking his own life.
Particularly in this production, Romeo and Juliet is no more a love story than Othello is a buddy movie. Austin Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet will provide you with a fun and thoughtful evening at the park. There were not many tears shed; the production is often more amusing than it is heartbreaking.
But rethinking a familiar tale is exactly what an infusion of a new energy — such as this bilingual melding — allows us to do. As always, the intrigue of a play lies with those characters who are most compelling. Sometimes that's the hero, and sometimes it's the messenger. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. Support the Chronicle. Romeo and Juliet , Austin Shakespeare. Information is power.
Support the free press, so we can support Austin. Photo courtesy of Kirk Tuck. We Know What We Want. That point is not immediately clear, particularly given the casting of the title roles. Gwen Kelso can be accepted as an uncommonly robust doncella, even next to her smaller-framed Capulet parents, but Collin Bjork as Romeo is as Scandinavian in appearance as in name. We lose an easy explanation for the family rivalries. The knot at the heart of the play is revealed as made of two strands: the elders' insistence on their better wisdom and on tradition, and the lovers' escape to emotion and experience.
Shakespeare's rhetorical flourishes are pruned back but the essential action and poetry remains. With a Teatro Vivoapproach, Spanish is regularly substituted for phrases of salutation, exclamation or declaration, fitted carefully into the pentameter.
In the audience monolingual English spectators get bit of spice in the language without losing the thread of action, and bilingual spectators find new resonance.
Not just in language but also in the relations of family, of women, of spouses, and of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Typically for us English speakers, the young lovers move this play. Romeo and Juliet strive against senseless convention. They embody the purity and vitality of passion.
Their deaths are caused by misunderstandings and the errors of others, leaving us the vision of love deftly snipped and preserved in the very bud. Gwendolyn Kelso and Collin Bjork are beautiful young persons.
They have stepped out of the flow of time, just as they have stepped out of the bounds of convention. There's a bouncing jubiliation and heedlessness in both of them throughout. Bjork, especially, is prey to his emotions. He exults to us as he perceives Julieta at her balcony; he huddles like a six-year-old below the stage when the intoxicated Mercutio and Benvolio go looking for him.
Romeo proffers love to Capulets even as he receives kicks to the gut; he sweats and raves on his knees after killing Tybalt; and in Friar Laurence's cell he collapses in an unmanly puddle of tears. Thought and precaution are alien to his intoxication, a point emphasized in Juliet's bed at morning, when he would happily delude himself that morning is not yet come.
With the unfolding of events Julieta moves visibly from the warm safety of women's protection to the more dangerous world of men. Celeste Mendoza as her mother Lady Capulet adores her daughter, recognizing the arbitrary reach of convention and male dominance. Ernesto "Roze" Rosas as Lord Capulet is a man used to exercising authority, and the interplay between them as Latin male and Latin female is subtle and telling.
And yet, for me this tellling of Romeo and Juliet becomes a tragedy of male certainties and arrogance. Justin Scalise as Mercutio delivers, as usual, a droll and nuanced performance, prefiguring that message. He mocks, prances, and trusts in his skill and strength, but is undone by Romeo's interfering in the battle with Tybalt.
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