Two examples immediately come to mind when considering modern adaptations of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” — one good, one … not so much. Let’s look first at “West Side Story.”
The Leonard Bernstein-composed musical is a well-executed example of the value of modernization. Far from the florid, overwrought pentameter of the original play, the musical not only brings setting and character up to speed but updates language, format and tone to synch up the whole endeavor.
Then there’s “Romeo + Juliet.” The 1996 feature film probably had the deceased bard checking with his ghostly press agent to make sure his stellar public reputation was still fully intact. That’s not to say there aren’t part of that movie to appreciate — besides the fact that it’s unselfconscious enough to just straight-up have a gun called “Sword” — but there’s no doubt it’s a sloppy mishmash of old and new that’s altogether unserviceable as a Shakespearean tragedy. It’s a classic example of a high-concept idea that never had a chance to succeed because of its own high concept.
Happily, “Radio and Juliet” falls closer to “West Side Story” than it does to “Romeo + Juliet,” a fact for which it mostly has Radiohead to thank. Without the stadio-experimental rock of the British quintet, the performance would have seemed discomfitingly intemporal. Instead, it’s pleasantly so.
The performance opens with an grainy black and white wall-sized video projection of what the audience can only assume is Juliet (Tijuana Krizman). Alone in her urban apartment (wood floors, spare furnishings, no pictures), she flashes back (or, forward?) to a different night over the strains of “Bullet Proof … I wish I was.” Meanwhile each male member of the cast walks on stage, the procession eventually ending with the one representing Romeo on stage by himself.
It’s there that “Radio and Juliet” briefly takes a turn for the disingenuous. Though OK Computer’s “Fitter Happier,” may a potent representation of how Thom Yorke viewed the world at that time, and though it makes for a decidedly cool background for Krizman to dance to, it’s thematically dissonant with Shakespear’s story and the action on stage.
Choreographer Edward Chug nails the feel of Juliet’s plight with Krizman’s solo, but the music gives a different message entirely. Looking like nothing so much as a marionette, Krizman jerks herself around stage to in the constraints placed on a member of a daughter of aristocracy. Likewise, the movements mesh with the music perfectly, as a computerized voice reads a rigid middle class manifesto: “Favors for favors / Fond but not in love / Charity standing orders / On Sundays ring road supermarket.”
This device is meant to take Shakespear’s original work — about, remember, two members of the high upper class in a a land replete with lords and servants — and turn it into a class struggle. Which, granted, is what “West Side Story” did, but “Radio and Juliet mixes its messages. Is Juliet the poor one, as indicated by her modest living accommodations in the opening film and the suit jackets worn by all of the male dancers? That would certainly seem to be the case, but then: In what way does “Fitter Happier” serve as an appropriate anthem?
Still, that’s a minor quibble with a production that’s really meant more as a visual/aural mash-up spectacle than a thematic musing on Verona’s royalty. By and large, Ballet Maribor performs the show with an appropriately loose attention to detail — the male dancers may not have been completely in sync, but it’s a planned sloppiness, a statement that the heart of the show lies in its emotion rather than its execution.
By the time the show hits its climax somewhere between “Like Spinning Plates” and “Sit Down Stand Up,” it has transitioned to a story that’s it’s own; having escaped the long shadow of Shakespeare, the sparse production and sharply modern touches (surgical masks at the masquerade ball; a lemon as poison) both shine. Though one gets the sense that Radiohead might advocate for a yet larger departure from traditional storytelling, “Radio and Juliet’s” departure from ballet’s classical structure is a laudable, thematic and beneficial choice.
There are a few ways to go when updating a classic work for a modern audience. The purest of purists, of course, would never dream of touching the original. For them, even a translation out of the work’s native language is a sacrilege, and you just lose so much of the original intent if the story isn’t presented on thirty five delicate papyrus scrolls.
The rest of the population, though, appreciates an update from time to time. Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” has been through the mixer in that regard, but “Radio and Juliet” falls comfortably on the stronger end of the spectrum, succeeding because of — rather than despite — it’s concept.
