DONCASTER FREE PRESS
29 MARCH 2005
by Eileen Caiger Gray

It sizzled! It stunned! It was brilliant! Out of a hundred I'd give it a hundred and eighty. Shakespeare4kidz? I don't think so! This West End quality production was far too good for the exclusive entertainment of teenage toe-rags. Anyone at all who enjoys a top-class musical with a weepy romantic storyline would have been thrilled and delighted to see this.

Talent was heaped high in this slick, flawless performance, which was as fresh and vibrant at the end of its seven-month run as it would have been at the beginning. You know it's a winner when you're surrounded by an audience of potential fidgety, mocking, trouble-making youths, but then find you're too engrossed to even notice they're there, and they're too engrossed to remind you.

The kids were drawn in straight off by a whirlwind first act, cram-packed with loud rock and beat numbers, movement a-plenty, and piles of comedy with twinges of farce. Modern costume was the order of the day (with Benvolio going to the masked ball as Superman), while simple, bright sets and back-lit key words set the scenes. The strong singing voices and acting talents of the cast were matched by the superb two-man percussion/keyboard band. Hints of Lloyd Webber, and one big contrapuntal number that could almost have come from Les Miserables, illustrate the quality of the music from Julian Chenery and Matt Gimblet.

I was worried, at first, that the light-hearted approach would eventually come to grief: this is a tragedy, after all. But, as the curtain fell at the end of act one, the mood suddenly turned sombre, Tybalt (in leather jacket) and Mercutio (in Hawaiian shirt) lying dead. This paved the way for the slower pace and grimmer mood of act two, still punctuated, though, by a few good laughs to lift it. And it worked a treat. The kids were with it all the way, enjoying the laughs and the music and maybe even shedding a secret tear or two at the end.

OK purists (like me) might have bewailed the fact that Shakespeare's actual lines were few and far between and that finer points of characterisation and intricacies of relationships were sung and danced into the shadows. But spot-on accuracy and flowing iambic pentameters were not the point of this version. The aim was to entertain, impress, and get people - even surly teenagers -  to enjoy themselves; just as Shakespeare  intended, really.

Certain liberties were taken with some characters. A rather wild Welsh Friar Lawrence (Greg Ashton) twirled his robes like a whirling dervish, as he hatched his cunning (whoops!) plan. The noble Paris became an upper-class twit. The Nurse (Emma Bennett) was a mixture of a plump Mrs Overall and a pantomime dame most of the time, and had the corniest lyric of the lot: Bit of a curse; could have been worse; I'm Juliet's nurse.

Romeo and Juliet (Serena Giacomini and Alex Tomkins), thankfully, didn't overdo the comedy and made a lovely pair of star-crossed lovers. But it was the endearing, charismatic and highly talented Jamie Anderson who stole the show as chubby, energetic, clowning Mercutio (who returned briefly from the grave, to great approval, as first a slapstick cook and then a comic Irish friar.) His famous, poetic Queen Mab speech  was now a big rock number: Queen Mab is fab; Queen Mab is bad; she's the woman of your dreams. Not quite the mood of the original, yet much appreciated all the same.

Surely this wonderful production will have inspired the odd pupil to be less fearful of Shakespeare and keen to watch another version - one with all the proper words. I'm certain that a passion for live music and live theatre will have been born in some, and I like to think, too, that every one there will now have realised that creativity is the most exciting thing on the planet.