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The Guardian
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
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.
Irish Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Juliet & Romeo review: Never was a story more woeful
Juliet & Romeo Director : Timothy Scott Bogart Cert : 12A Starring : Jamie Ward, Clara Rugaard, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Nicholas Podany, Derek Jacobi, Martina Ortiz Luis, Rupert Graves Running Time : 2 hrs 2 mins It's a small point, but one of the more bizarre oddities – among many – in this hopeless musical variation on Shakespeare 's most kissy play is the stubborn visibility of the actors' breath, even when indoors. The original work is set in balmy Verona towards the end of July. Could someone not have bunged an auld Superser into the shooting space? Jason Isaacs , Rupert Everett and (god bless him) Derek Jacobi deserve better. Anyway, one needs something to divert oneself when sitting through two hours of dreary sub-boyband ballads sung in unending transatlantic warble. What we have here, courtesy of the brothers Timothy Scott Bogart and Evan Kidd Bogart, is the alleged opening third of a trilogy based around 'the real-life [sic] 1301 story that inspired Shakespeare's greatest tale'. Trilogy? No reader of The Irish Times will need to be told that the title characters died at the end of Shakey's version. Are they really going to spend 122 minutes on the first act and a half? Will parts two and three work as prequels? For fear of spoilers, we'll deliver the answer parenthetically at the end of the review. To be fair, the Bogarts – sons of Neil Bogart, late founder of renowned disco label Casablanca Records – are not without ambition. Juliet & Romeo makes some attempt to address Verona's complex relations with Rome in the early 14th century. There is an admirable aside about the pressures then put on the Jewish communities. READ MORE Otherwise the story, delivered in flat modern vernacular, sticks reasonably closely to the familiar text. The Danish actor Clara Rugaard is rather good as Juliet. The Australian Jamie Ward doesn't fall over as Romeo. They become entangled despite being from warring families. They flirt on balconies. 'What's a name, really?' one actually says. [ Dangerous Animals review: Jaws meets Wolf Creek in this watery Ozploitation movie Opens in new window ] The thing is unremittingly dull and bland (not to mention cold, apparently). If it is good for anything it is good for providing deserved paid holidays to venerable older actors and their long johns. Jacobi is a wonder. Not only, at 86, is he leaping around like a young thing, but, in the role of Friar Lawrence, he manages to make the dialogue sound like something other than spiritless pabulum. Whatever they paid him it was not nearly half enough. (Parenthetical spoiler: the lovers don't die at the end any longer. The friar had a plan all along.) In cinemas from Friday, June 11th
