Juliet & Romeo review – Rebel Wilson and Jason Isaacs cameo in syrupy Shakespeare musical

With bare-faced cheek, this bardless take replaces all the original language with olden-days-effect prose – adding singing, dancing and a pointlessly starry castDirector and former stage actor Timothy Scott Bogart is best known for having made Spinning Gold, a biopic of his father Neil Bogart, the New York music producer and founder of the 70s disco-era label Casablanca Records. Now he has confected a syrupy new musical take on Romeo and Juliet, with music by his brother Evan Kidd Bogart (who won a Grammy for his work on Beyoncé’s single Halo).Bogart retells the basic story but with Shakespeare’s language all removed and replaced with olden-days-effect prose: a kind of bardless Baz Luhrmann. Ultimately – with what I do have to admit is some amiable cheek – Bogart contrives to do for this play what Nahum Tate did for King Lear. It’s really pretty bland, and with each turn in the plot you have to ask what the point of it actually is. Continue reading...

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