Juliet & Romeo review – Rebel Wilson and Jason Isaacs cameo in syrupy Shakespeare musical
Director and former stage actor Timothy Scott Bogart is best known for having made Spinning Gold, a biopic of his father Neil Bogart, the New York music producer and founder of the 70s disco-era label Casablanca Records. Now he has confected a syrupy new musical take on Romeo and Juliet, with music by his brother Evan Kidd Bogart (who won a Grammy for his work on Beyoncé's single Halo).
Bogart retells the basic story but with Shakespeare's language all removed and replaced with olden-days-effect prose: a kind of bardless Baz Luhrmann. Ultimately – with what I do have to admit is some amiable cheek – Bogart contrives to do for this play what Nahum Tate did for King Lear. It's really pretty bland, and with each turn in the plot you have to ask what the point of it actually is.
Clara Rugaard has an honest stab at Juliet and in an actual production of the play (that is one which hadn't hobbled itself by amputating its whole linguistic identity), she might have made a real impression. Jamie Ward smoulders and fizzles damply through the role of Romeo. Elsewhere, there's a whole host of big names phoning in small contributions. Jason Isaacs is Montague (Romeo's dad), Rupert Everett is Capulet (Juliet's dad) and Rebel Wilson is weirdly and unwontedly deadpan as Lady Capulet. Derek Jacobi gives it loads as the gentle, avuncular, silver-bearded Friar Lawrence who is on the side of the star-crossed lovers and Dan Fogler is the apothecary whom this production reinvents as Jewish, helping people escaping antisemitism. Romeo gets an actual physical confrontation with Paris (Dennis Andres), the young man that Juliet's parents have earmarked as her fiance.
There is no radical reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet here, and the staging, costumes and performances look as if they come from something as trad as Zeffirelli's 60s version … only it's modern-language. Not worth the two hours' traffic of their stage.
Juliet & Romeo is in UK cinemas on 11 June.
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