William Shakespeare’s, Romeo and Juliet, is now in production at the Heritage Center Theatre in Morrisville, Pa., until July 29.
The classic tale of star-crossed lovers is anything but perfect as the Heritage Center Theatre’s cast put on a disappointing performance on their opening night of Friday, July 13.
In an 85-seat theater, where the square footage is smaller than the average American home, audience members were met with office fans that sat in the two corners in front of the stage and blew the audience’s warm breath back into their faces.
Due to an electrical surge earlier in the week, the Heritage Center Theatre was left without air conditioning during the hot summer nights of mid-July.
Throughout the five-act play, I counted multiple times where the actors stumbled over their lines throughout the production. When they weren’t stumbling over their own lines, actors went through them as if they were forced to recite them. At some moments, I was transported back to my 9th grade English class, where Mrs. Nava forced hesitant students to read aloud in front of the class.
The leading lady of the show, Kelly Colleran (Juliet Capulet), seemed to speed through each one of her lines as if she had to get every last word out in each breath. Colleran’s fast recital of lines made her clearly out of breath and hard to understand.
While the male lead of the show, Nick Napoli (Romeo Montague), could barely convey emotion through his performance. Each time he attempted to show a different emotion, whether it was sadness or affection, Napoli would get louder and start to yell his lines to the audience. Keep in mind that the theater sat only 85 and his shouting hurt my ears, I didn’t even ask the elderly couples sitting around me what they had been thinking.
There were a few times throughout the production where there had been more than 15 actors on the stage at once (sword fight, masquerade). The stage, which was not very big, could not handle this many actors at once. The scenes were over-crowded, and you could not follow what was going on because everyone was so close together. Though trying to preserve the authenticity of the production, the over-crowding of the couple of scenes really brought you outside of the show.
One of the biggest problems of the production was the set itself. A two-story building which served as the only set throughout the entire show, looked very authentic to the Verona setting of the play. To the right of the building was even a fountain with running water.
With three doorways on the bottom, each with a black curtain, to mask the entrances and exits of each actor, and a matching three doorways above them to serve as balconies, the building looked very genuine. The upper balconies were used to proclaim announcements from, with of course, the key balcony for the Act II, Scene II, passage where Romeo and Juliet share a secret moment. The top-right doorway was used for this scene.
Though the building looked more than true to the show, there was one glaring issue that just could not be excused; the set was too big.
The tops of the upper-balcony doorways went way above the lighting in the ceiling of the theater. Standing in the doorway of the upper section of the set, any audience member would have to crane their neck to be able to fully see the actor in the scene, unless they preferred to watch with the scaffolding of the lighting coming across the actor’s mid-section.
During the iconic balcony scene, Colleran, who was portraying Juliet, had to kneel onto the ground and perform the scene almost laying on the floor. What should have been the pivotal scene of the show, was not as Romeo held up his hand to the girl who looked ready to go to sleep.
Honorable Mention:
The only enjoyable part of the entire production was Cat Miller as Mercutio. Miller nailed the role of Romeo’s best friend and portrayed a male better than the males who were actually on the stage. It was unfortunate that Miller was playing the character who was the first to die, it would have been nice to see her continue her performance past Act III.