Beauty in simplicity

It is a story that has been told time and time again in far too many ways to realistically list, just about everyone, Shakespeare fan or not, knows the tale of Romeo and Juliet. This week I was able to see a version of this story unlike any I had seen before. Designed for younger audiences Romeo y Julieta  is a very simplistic and bilingual retelling of Shakespeare's famous love story, which was to be honest not my favorite version by any means. There were times when I was simply confused due to my inability to understand Spanish which in my opinion distracted greatly from the play and if I hadn't already known the story I probably would have been pretty lost. However I did enjoy how wonderfully simple the play was, there was a definite lack of sets choosing instead to use flags with different images to indicate the setting of the scene, whether in a church in the room of Julieta, or in a cemetery I was able to focus solely on the characters and the dialogue between them. The decidedly otherwise black backdrop was a perfect and eerily appropriate way to keep the audience focused purely on the development of the story which as we all know ends rather tragically. 

I did however find a few elements to be more of a hindrance than a help to the play. There was for example quite a lot of music, played or sung by the actors themselves, that was honestly pretty distracting to the main dialogue or major developments in the story. For example when Julieta is debating whether or not to take the sleeping potion given to her, I felt it would have been much more powerful to have her simply sit there and speak to the audience, allowing us to sit in silence and debate the possibilities along with her rather than having the rest of the actors make "oo" sounds while crawling toward her. For me it kind of took away from the seriousness of the situation at hand. It seemed to contrast greatly with the other decisions to scale down on so much of the production such as the length of the play, the lack of sets, and the small amount of actors and where this subtractions somehow added so much to the value of the words spoken and actions made by the characters, this addition of music stole that value away from the viewers. In short there is much beauty that can come from taking something complex and making it so simple that a even a child can understand it, assuming of course that child speaks Spanish.