Finding The Essence of Romeo & Juliet: Adam Adolfo Defies the Stars to Believe in Love

Finding The Essence of

Adam Adolfo on Directing Shakespeare’s Classic Play

By the time the curtain rises on opening night, September 13^th at the Rose Marine Theater, a director has already spent months – maybe even years – building the production. He must carefully study the script, audition the actors, and work with the creative team to design the set, costumes, sound, and lights – all before ever stepping foot into a rehaearsal room. Director Adam Adolfo has been spending a lot of time with Shakespeare in recent years having directed productions of A Midsummer Nights Dream and Much Ado About Nothing for OnStage In Bedford and Henry V for Stolen Shakespeare Guild.  Late last week, Adam took time out of his busy schedule to talk about his thoughts on the play, and the process of creating this production of Romeo & Juliet.

Question: When did you first read Romeo & Juliet?

Adam Adolfo: Oh it seems like centuries ago! I actually came to Shakespeare early. I was in 5^th grade and happened upon a “Stories of Shakespeare” book and really enjoyed it. The actual formal text came much later. I think I was in 9^th grade and was ‘forced’ to read it for my English class. I do remember I didn’t like it. I’m being honest. I in fact hated it! I was bored out of my mind reading it. I then got to see the Zeferelli film and still was ‘unimpressed’. It wasn’t until Baz Lurhman’s modern take with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Daines did I suddenly get it. “OH! THIS IS A STORY ABOUT PEOPLE LIKE ME!” That was a big revelation for me. Several years late, I got to study at the Texas Shakespeare Festival and fell in love so deeply with Shakespeare. The impact on me as a teen then has had career length ramifications. Now years later, I am forced to remember that for most of us, we already know who Romeo & Juliet are long before we ever read the play or see an adaptation. These two characters are now icons of “true love”.

 

Q: How is the play different from that popular idea we all have of the “true love” Romeo & Juliet? 

AA: In Shakespeare’s plays, the prologue, often delivered by the chorus, but in ours delivered by our amazing singer Michael Alonzo, describes the popular idea of the plays protagonist, but the play itself shows it’s truth about that character. We learn that these 2 feuding families will help push our ‘star-crossed lovers’ to take their own lives! That’s a lot of information to handle in the first 45 seconds of a play. Talk about having a ‘killer tweet’. In 140 characters we could pretty much sum up Romeo and Juliet. 

 

A pair of star-crossed lovers
Photo by Mark Mayr

Q: What makes your Romeo & Juliet different than the ones we’ve seen in the past?

AA: To be honest – JULIA ROBERTS. (Laughs) No seriously. I started thinking about this story and all I could think was ‘Why does everyone always make the show ‘sooo serious?!’ Sure there’s murder, and drugs, and suicide, but that is not where the show starts! In the beginning - there’s fun, love, and laughs - If you stop and think about it – until the moment Romeo leave’s Juliet because of his banishment – it’s a romantic comedy! Boy meets girl. Boy falls for girl. So when the actors and I are working with the script, especially the first half of the show, I keep screaming at them “STOP DOING SHAKESPEARE! THIS IS A JULIA ROBERTS MOVIE!” In the first half of the show I feel we have more fun and joy, laughter and love, than traditional staging’s of Romeo and Juliet. This makes it more tragic when the bad stuff happens. 

That coupled with the ethnic feud of Cubans and Americans, makes our show quite different. Ethnically speaking we simply have to create two culturally polar opposite families to achieve the story. So, in staging Romeo’s family as part of the wealthy and frequently mob associated sect of 1958 Havana Cuba. Pairing that with Juliet’s family, rich Americans who like many of the time included Sinatra, Kennedy, Hemingway, and Errol Flynn, saw Havana as a tropical playground of the Caribbean full of sun, sand, and sin. These two things put together create a chemical reaction that is as volatile as Shakespeare’s young lovers.

At the end of the day, we're doing best as actor's, directors, and designers to 'defy the stars' and believe in love. The show's power lies in its willingness to fight the odds for love. So we're doing the same!

 

Q: You are working on Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. Where do you start when creating your own interpretation of such a well-known piece?

 AA: Oh my… that’s hard to say. It’s different every time. Shakespeare can be doubly hard and intimidating. The first Shakespeare I ever directed was Hamlet and I remember thinking, “The producer must be nuts to trust ME with Shakespeare!” But it ended up being an extremely exciting experience. The terrors wear off, but it never really goes away. In recent years, I’ve managed to do A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and Henry V so Shakespeare is more like an old friend that every few years I re-meet to “catch up” with. There’s a familiarity now, so I think that helps deal with much of the butterflies. Honestly, each project I direct, Shakespeare or otherwise, is conceived by other art. It’s sometimes a painting, sometimes a film, sometimes a photo. With Romeo and Juliet, it was a song. I am not a fan of “concept for concept’s sake” when it comes to Shakespeare. That’s how you get shows like “Hamlet in Hawaii”. But when the concept can illuminate the story, rather than be a gaudy bauble you hand around its neck - you have a really exciting project on your hands. For Romeo and Juliet, I kept trying to figure out what the feuding cultures would be and while driving one day, I was listening to music from singer and actress Linda Eder when a song about what it was like in Havana in the 1950’s came on my CD player. I immediately was intrigued. I’ve always had a great interest with Cuba. In fact, my first show at Artes, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, was inspired by Cuban culture. Knowing the country’s history, it was interesting to see how the events of late 1958, early 1959 mirrored the events of Shakespeare’s world (i.e. the civil unrest, the power struggle of warring factions). Seeing Romeo and Juliet set in that world wasn’t a hard leap…

 

Artes de la Rosa Artistic Director
Adam Adolfo

Q: How do you think about the characters of Romeo & Juliet as your audition actors for the roles?

AA: Auditions are an exciting time. “YOU NEVER KNOW.” Sometimes they are full of familiar faces, and sometimes they are bright-eyed newbies looking to take the stage. This cast is a great mixture of both. Several of them are “veterans” of Artes de la Rosa, some which most recently have been seen in our production of In The Heights. No less than five of those musical actors are returning to Romeo and Juliet and all of them are making their Shakespeare debut. For some people, the cast may seem surprisingly young - and it’s true, but the energy of a younger cast lends itself to the urgency and impulsiveness of these characters. Shakespeare was telling a very young story… it’s almost comical now to go back and see the 1936 film with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer. They are “long in the tooth” and short in the power, which is exactly what I was looking for in a young cast: POWER. For example, Romeo… He makes a dramatic transformation; he changes from a boy who’s in love with the idea of love – namely in the infatuation of Rosaline, to an extraordinary young man, after his meeting with Juliet at the masquerade ball. He finds love with her and his language changes. We see his vivid imagination in the poetry. Then when he faces Tybalt, we his capacity for violence, rage, and destruction. We are all capable of that kind of emotional range – but as an audience that’s a lot to receive in 2 hours.  The same can be said of Juliet who at times is a school girl but mere moments later a strong woman.

 

Q: As you work with your scenic, costume, sound and lighting team to create this production what have you done to make “Verona” come alive for us?

AA: Well this production doesn’t take place in Verona. For us it’s Havana in 1958. This is an exciting time in Cuba’s history and made for an appropriate substitution for Elizabethan Verona.  It’s exciting, exotic, and tempting – which is pretty much how Shakespeare saw Verona. It was the ‘big city’ in a foreign land. I imagine it’s the way some people still think of Paris or Venice. Our goal was to turn the Rose Marine Theatre into a living nightclub casino from Havana’s heyday. So we treat the entire space as “The Rose Club” complete with a Master of Ceremonies, showgirls, and gambling! This means it provided the staging a lot of opportunity to make it very theatrical. We have a grand red curtain, a set of beautiful show girls, a choreographer, a mob boss who’s running the casino.  The idea was to make the audience feel like they are in a place where they could see these things happening in the world around them. We have dance sequences that are very physical and beautiful but surprisingly support the text very fluidly – almost as if Shakespeare had always intended for us to ‘dance out the answer’ (one of my favorite quotes from Much Ado About Nothing). That ability to embrace the theatrical has made it possible to bring new looks, interpretations, and sounds to the show! We’re very excited.

 

Q: You mentioned new sounds? Can you be more specific?

Balthasar the Balladeer
Played by Michael Diego Alonzo

AA: Well, I don’t want to say what we’re doing is a musicalization of Romeo and Juliet, but there is A LOT of music in the show. Shakespeare pulled music from the streets, from court dancing, from liturgical services. He was extremely aware of the world outside and wanted to bring it in – so in many ways, we’ve made the choice to operate under the same circumstances. We have a brilliant young actor, Michael Alonzo, who was one of the stars of In the Heights, playing the Emcee in this production. He sings about 6 songs in the production and they range in style from pop to opera to liturgical and are in 5 languages! He sings in Latin, English, French, Spanish, and Italian! Some of the music will be very familiar and some will be very traditional – but all of it will surprise you in how well it fits in the story!

 

Q: Do you want to share any song choices with us?

AA: Let’s just say that you’ll hear J-Lo, Michael Buble, Marc Anthony, Pavarotti, Josh Groban and even Ricky Martin! Be prepared to dance!

 

Q: What advice would you give someone who’s seeing Shakespeare performed in the theatre for the first time?

AA: Shakespeare is one of the greatest – IF NOT THE GREATEST – storyteller of all time! This is something you just have to go and ‘receive’ like a present. The actors on stage are extremely talented and they will make sure you ‘understand’ this poetry. It is meant to be beautiful, poetic and theatrical. There is something to be expected for everyone! There’s dancing, singing, romance, violence, sadness, joy… basically it’s a Stephen Speilberg film!  Sometimes there is an expection when it comes to Shakespear that you have to really ‘work’ to understand everything. We promise you, just understand the emotions and the words become very easy to understand! Just be present and ‘accept’ all the beautiful things coming at you on a very personal human level.  Shakespeare’s audiences hadn’t read the script in advance – they just experienced it. So I encourage you to come out to the Rose Marine Theatre and experience Shakespeare.

 

Romeo & Juliet - Photo by Mark Mayr

Artes & Shakespeare: It's about Passion!

I’ve been asked more than once… why Shakespeare for Artes de la Rosa? Well the best answer is that Latinos are a passionate people and Shakespeare was a passionate playwright. Placing them together seems like the most obvious of combinations. So I’ve set out to make the Passion of Shakespeare something everyone can understand! You may think you hate Shakespeare. You may say it’s hard to understand and you may even say its boring. I promise you – You won’t be saying that about THIS PRODUCTION of ROMEO AND JULIET!

“All the world’s a stage,” comes the saying from many theatre artists... Their voice proudly professing their passion and love. I believe to truly find that voice, you have to be silent, still, and open to the inspiration that it brings. Your voice comes from your passion and if you don’t know where your passion comes from, you are without a voice; mute. For me, I found it in the dark. In East Texas. On a hot summer night.

The year was 1999 and I was attending the Texas Shakespeare Festival Acting Workshops in Kilgore Texas. I was headed to school to pursue a degree in theatre arts that fall. I had been active in community theatre and high school theatre, but hadn’t really found my voice in the art or love for it. To be honest, I was pursuing the degree because I was good at it; not because I loved it… the Festival that summer had introduced me to wonderful staging’s of The Miser, The Fantasticks, and Antony and Cleopatra but I still didn’t’ feel like I knew where my voice fit and where my love was? The final production that I saw that summer was Two Gentleman of Verona directed by Tom Whitaker.

I remember sitting in the theatre, in awe and wonder at the parts of the whole… the bare raked stage, the 3 piece jazz band, the lounge singer…the sheer romance of the production, the simple details. The images of that show, 14 years later, still glow in my head. The men’s white suits, the bobbed hair of Michele Tauber who’s character name I could never remember, the long white gown of the ‘lounge singer’ (Sarah Hartmann, whom to this day, I still see in my mind’s eye, poised, statuesque, an icon of 1930’s jazz). But what I remember most about that evening is that for two hours, I didn’t breathe.

I just took it in. The design. The words. The actors. The show. It helped remind me what it’s all about, Love. Love is simple. Love is kind. Love is pure. Nothing ostentatious, nothing sly, just the actors, the language and the audience. At the end of the show, when the cast took the stage to sing the finale “Love Is,” I realized…my eyes were wet. To this day I can’t tell you how long I had been crying, but it had come. I looked at the cast, and there was not a dry eye among them. I fell in love with Shakespeare that evening. I fell in love with the magic of the language and the lyrical poetry executed so stunningly by the cast of brilliant actors. But what is even more special is that I know I was sharing it with a production staff, crew, and cast that loved it as much as I would grow to love it. As the cast raised their voice to sing, I found mine. I fell in love with theatre that night and all the passion that a group of people, both performers and audience alike, could share together – simply because a man named William Shakespeare over two hundreds of years earlier had written a play.

14 years later, I am helming my own Shakespeare shows, running Artes de la Rosa artistic future and yet, still recalling the night Shakespeare gave me a voice. In my time at Stephen F. Austin State University, I learned technique, skill, communication, artistry but not heart. I am grateful to say, I learned that before I got to school. I learned that I must touch you, “the audience”, personally as a human being if I am to succeed as an artist. My hope now is to one day direct a piece that is going to make a teenager fall in love with theatre, the way Mr. Whitaker, made me fall in love with Shakespeare that summer night 14 years ago.

That’s why I think Shakespeare is the next perfect step in the continuing artistic journey for Artes de la Rosa. If it can impact me as a teenager while still being the most produced playwright in history, how can we not provide the opportunity to the Artes de la Rosa patrons to experience that kind of passion? With this special new staging of Romeo and Juliet, I hope to impart to the people of North Texas the inspiration and passion that William Shakespeare gave me that summer of 1999.

In hindsight, that was the moment that defined what I hoped to become…the moment Shakespeare put a voice to my love…it was the moment I chose a life as a theatre person. So when someone asks me what I do in the theatre, I do not tell them I’m a playwright, an administrator, or director, but rather I raise my voice and say, “I’m a Theatre Maker.”

- Adam Adolfo, Artistic Director; Artes de la Rosa

SIDE NOTE: Don’t Forget Tickets go on sale tomorrow! We've got a deal that you'll FALL IN LOVE WITH! To celebrate the greatest love story ever told, Artes de la Rosa will be offering a special discount when you buy your tickets on the first day. On that day ONLY, when you use the promo code TRUELOVE you will receive a $5 discount on each ticket purchased including the gala opening night event.

PHOTO CREDIT: Photo's 2,3, & 4 from The 1999 Season production of TWO GENTELMEN OF VERONA at the Texas Shakespeare Festival. Director Tom Whitaker. Artistic Director Raymond Caldwell.