I’m just back from seeing Romeo and Juliet, directed by OSF’s previous Artistic Director Nataki Garrett, who chose to set it in the present day in an unnamed West Coast city (think Oakland). The acting was excellent, the scenery and props added to the storytelling, and the cast was great – but the setting didn’t really work for me.

The play was set “today”, so of course the characters had smartphones. Garrett played that fact for laughs early in the play when Capulet uses the phone to dictate (complete with “comma” and “period”) the invitation to the party where Romeo and Juliet will meet. Romeo had his phone with him in exile in Mantua and used it there to communicate back to Verona – so why wouldn’t Friar Lawrence have let him known of Juliet’s scheme and avoided (spoiler alert) the fatal misunderstanding when Romeo finds Juliet “dead”?

Once more, I’m squeezing today’s blog entry in early so that I don’t have to try to do it after we see Romeo and Juliet tonight (it was 11:30 when we got back to our room after Twelfth Night last night, and I suspect Romeo and Juliet may run even longer).

We started this morning with Barry Kraft delivering a wonderful exploration of Romeo and Juliet, touching on the poetry, sonnets in particular, the significance of the year 1595 to Shakespeare, death, and more. I could have listened to him for far longer, but we had to move on.

Tyrone Wilson brought a guest with him for today’s Theatre Reflections: Armando McClain who played Orsino in Twelfth Night. Armando talked a bit about the play and his career, then spent another twenty minutes answering our questions about life at OSF, fighting, intimacy (well, how an intimacy director helps the actors), being an understudy in addition to having a lead role, and more. I’m always grateful for the actors who come to these sessions at 10:30am after having been in a performance the night before – and we were the second group he’d spoken to this morning. I guess actors don’t sleep during the season.

This afternoon, we saw Rent; I knew a very little about the story and I’d heard “Seasons of Love” a few times, but that was about it. I really enjoyed the performance, but I could have used subtitles because the orchestra overwhelmed the actors a lot of the time.