Zach Colangelo as Nurse and Jade Douris O’Hara as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet to Sept. 1 at Point Pleasant Park. (Sara Graham)
Director Drew O’Hara’s 90-minute version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is remarkably clear, full of life and a fun balance of light and dark, comedy and tragedy.
It’s been a rough summer of rain for Nova Scotia’s outdoor theatre. Luckily the night I saw Romeo and Juliet in Point Pleasant Park a half-moon grew ever brighter in a clear sky.
The actors gestured to that moon – according to the text – and then, as the night grew darker and colder, the play wound down from its radiant love and joie de vivre to its perfect chilly end of extinguished light, love and light.
Shakespeare by the Sea’s production of this classic tale of star-crossed lovers and brawling youth brims with teenage energy, contemporary costumes and lively acting as the actors race around the ramparts and across the grass of Cambridge Battery.
Jade Douris O’Hara’s Juliet, in a blue polka dotted dress, is far from an ethereal princess. She is down-to-earth, enthusiastic, short-tempered and anxious to experience love. She sits cross-legged and pines with petulance and uncertainty.
Douris O’Hara captures her vitality and the beauty of her language, as does Patrick Jeffrey as Romeo, a sensitive, boyish teen who matures through his discovery of love. The attraction between the two, who meet at a masquerade with a DJ and fun dancing, is very convincing.
The supporting characters ranges from Rachel Lloyd’s wonderful, physically-adept and comic depiction of Peter, the illiterate Capulet servant who launches the tragedy, to Geneviève Steele’s icy and compelling portrait of the rigid, impassioned Lady Capulet.
Juliet is particularly impatient with Nurse and Nurse, a comic character more interested in carnal than sacrificial love, is loud and impatient too. Zach Colangelo plays Nurse with a lot of high drama and comedy but this Nurse can also be tender and, in grief, muted and very moving.
Seeing Colangelo also as Tybalt requires a shake of the head; however, Colangelo makes Tybalt – the dreaded Capulet to Romeo’s Montague – an impressive, rivetting and disconcerting piece of vain nastiness and menacing violence.
O’Hara also has Aryelle Morrison as Romeo’s hot-headed friend Mercutio act with super high energy, intense physicality and youthful hijinks which is amusing but sometimes over-the-top.
A lovely addition to this production is a subtle, beautifully atmospheric use of original song by Garry Williams, the musical director.
Rain did hamper me getting to this show in a goodly time. And, judging from the crowd on the night I saw it, there is pent-up demand to get out and enjoy some entertaining theatre outdoors. Romeo and Juliet, with a 15-minute intermission, is on at 7 p.m. tonight (August 25); Sunday, August, 27; Wednesday, August 30, and Friday, Aug. 1. The 30th season wraps up with Pinocchio on Sept. 2 and The Unrehearsed Dream on Sept. 3. https://www.shakespearebythesea.ca/
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