The show has been hotly anticipated, and details beyond its roster of cast and creatives have been kept largely under wraps, until now. This is Romeo + Juliet as you’ve never quite seen it before, exposed bra straps and all.
No, thine eyes do not deceive you: Those are indeed stuffed animals strewn about the stage early in the show.
Until now, the best sense of the show has come from a teaser trailer featuring Zegler and Connor in suburban New Jersey, set to Antonoff’s band Bleachers’ “Tiny Moves” and released in May. They canoodle on a couch and in a bathtub full of stuffed animals (“There’s lots of teddy bears in this production,” Connor says, Zegler backing him up, wide-eyed: “He’s not even lying”), dressed in windbreakers and tank tops, the back of Zegler-as-Juliet’s bra visible over the back of her top throughout, Connor-as-Romeo kneeling on the bedspread in black boxer briefs and reaching out to caress her face. That sense of imperfect charged-up youth will be present in the show, they promise, even if the dialogue is a few hundred years old.
“We don’t change any of the language, but I think it’s also very much kind of grounded in the modern day and with the youth of today,” Connor says. “I think that this production is exploring lots of things about what it is to be a young person today and exploring things like violence and sex and societal pressures and all that fun stuff.”
It’s never specified whether the fair Verona where Gold’s production lays its scene is in Shakespeare’s Italy, or, say, Verona, New Jersey, a suburb whose name causes Zegler to perk up and chirp “I played volleyball there!” while Connor marvels, “Oh, is that actually a place?”
The theater where the Montagues, Capulets, and their associates will let their bloody love story unravel isn’t just any stage, either: The Circle in the Square isn’t just where Gold won that Tony for directing the musical Fun Home, or where he staged his recent critically lauded play An Enemy of the People, but it’s also the closest thing Broadway has to a theater in the round setup, its thrust stage meaning that there are both no bad seats for the audience, and nowhere to hide for its nervous stars. The production announced floor seats for the show, which Zegler says will be “like seeing a movie in 4DX” for those who opt for them, while Connor warns, “You’re not just on the edge of the action, you’re in it, frankly. That’s how we want it to be. We want to take these scenes that are incredibly iconic and you want to feel like you’re there.”
New Jersey native Zegler was awestruck seeing the theater transformed for the show. “As someone who’s grown up seeing shows in this theater, I’ve never seen it used in such a way, where it’s kind of become a jungle gym of sorts for the cast of and the crew of this show,” she says. “It’s a lot of like running, jumping, climbing, and I think that that’s a really cool thing to bring into it, and that’s why all of us have never been in better shape.”
And adding to that “incredibly immersive” vibe in the intimate venue, Zegler says, is Antonoff’s score. The show isn’t a musical, but they’ll both sing in it, they tease. Or, as Connor says, “She sings. I make an attempt.”
