Romeo and Juliet hits Bard on the Beach, to September 24
Director Anita Rochon tells the tale of star-crossed lovers from Juliet’s perspective
Ghazal Azarbad and Daniel Fong in Romeo and Juliet.
Bard on the Beach presents Romeo and Juliet at Sen̓ákw/Vanier Park from August 3 to September 24; opening is August 9
ROMEO AND JULIET gets a new take at this year’s Bard on the Beach. Director Anita Rochon (Cymbeline, 2014) tells the story through Juliet’s eyes, beginning the play inside the burial crypt. Juliet awakens beside Romeo, only to realize that her secret plan has gone terribly wrong. As she pieces together incidents that have led up to this tragic moment, audiences see things from her point of view.
“Experiencing this familiar story from Juliet’s perspective puts some things into sharper focus – like her relationship with her family – and asks us to consider what it would be like to be a young woman in this society,” Rochon says in the director’s notes. “We broaden the scope of who-plays-what on stage in the representation of love in many forms: between a parent and their child, between childhood friends, between a mentor and a pupil, between a young woman and her nurse and, of course, between two young people who just met. The original script is still our map, but sometimes we will take a different path to get where the story is going.”
The production features Ghazal Azarbad (Shakespeare in Love, 2019) as Juliet and Daniel Fong as Romeo, with Jennifer Lines as Lady Capulet, Andrew McNee as the Nurse, Ishan Sandhu as Paris, and Anita Wittenberg as Friar Laurence.
The team behind the scenes includes set designer Pam Johnson, costume designer Carmen Alatorre (who re-creates Italian Renaissance styles through silhouettes), composer and musical director Joelysa Pankanea, fight director Jonathan Hawley Purvis, and lighting designer Sophie Tang.
For more information, see bardonthebeach.org.
