Off Road Shakespeare’s (ORS) free outdoor production of Romeo and Juliet makes full use of Red Square’s unintended stages. The ensemble performs the play, and the audience sets the cast! Right at 4 PM, Leah Adcock-Starr, director and artistic executive for ORS, playfully yet skillfully gets audience members to step up to the hat of chance to pick which actors will play every role in the show. One group picks the Capulets family (Juliet’s people), the next group picks the Montagues (Romeo’s kin), and so on until even Romeo and Juliet are picked by random selection. The audience itself picks whether it will be a Capulet or Montague, and this determines which of the stage managers one follows as the scenes move about Red Square. I landed with the Capulets.
This way of casting means that actors had to prepare several roles and come ready for any of them. Quite a challenge, and it also means that no two shows are alike.
There’s not much need for a spoiler alert as Shakespeare gave away the plot in the prologue:
(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
Performance Ensemble: Rudy Roushdi, Corey Lynn Atencio, Adrian Cerrato, Hazel Lozano, Mimi Santos, Lindsay Zae Summers, Celia Forrest, Jonelle Jordan, Kieran Adcock-Starr, Tatiana Pavela, Tamsen Glaser, Wiley Basho Gorn, Lily Warpinski.