James McMenamin and Mia Vallet in Ashville; image © Sandra Coudert
To reverse baseball manager Casey Stengel, “Can’t anybody here game this play?” The play is Romeo and Juliet, which I cannot remember having seen a competent professional production of in New York. Two summers ago, we had the Royal Shakespeare Company’s shockingly amateurish version, and now Broadway is enduring a very similar performance of the play that is only slightly less appalling, defective in everything from its conception to its casting. Aspiring theater producers might want to consider that if they insist upon casting age-inappropriate members of Pirates of the Caribbean in the role of Romeo, then they should choose sixty-two-year-old Geoffrey Rush—the one who can act.
Instead, we have thirty-six-year-old Orlando Bloom. One wants to like Mr. Bloom, who seems like a decent enough fellow with a self-deprecating sense of humor about his silly Hobbit-hugging movie roles, in which he is the cinematic equivalent of one of those gentlemen who make their livings modeling for the covers of paperback romance novels. Aged somewhere between Hamlet and Macbeth, Mr. Bloom told Playbillthat he did not feel at odds with the role because, antique Veronese life expectancies being what they were, the young couple were bound to be more like twenty-first-century members of his own age cohort than like teenagers. Besides the perennial question of why it is that actors are allowed to speak in public when there is nobody around to
