Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story by William Shakespeare

All these lines were not the finished product they were the blueprint. I was always frustrated at school by the fact that were reading what were meant to be plays. The gap between Shakespeare and today’s English is hardly that wide, but restaged productions can have a comparable difficulty about them at a smaller scale. Any of us writing for Collider could pen the most beautiful piece of insight into the greatest movie ever made, but it wouldn’t have a shred of impact on someone who didn’t understand a word of English and had no supporting framework to understand it. Context matters for it as for everything. While complimentary toward more traditional productions, Luhrmann did seem to suggest a certain authenticity to performances from Shakespeare’s own time.Īnd yet, from school days to now, the approach to Shakespeare taken by Luhrmann and many others – keeping the language while leaping to far-off, often contemporary, times and places – has always had the opposite effect on me than the one intended. In discussing the film, however, Luhrmann insisted that he “wanted…to look at the way in which Shakespeare might make a movie of one of his plays if he was a director…he was a relentless entertainer and a user of incredible devices and theatrical tricks.” His stylized depiction of a late 20th century American city came out of research into the Elizabethan world, and he insisted that the English of Shakespeare’s time would have sounded more like contemporary American ( not quite true). Extravagance in sets, costumes, colors, and MTV-style editing all showcase Luhrmann’s visual flair.

Swords become guns (with convenient sword-related brand names).

Feuding nobles are replaced with mafia families with legitimate fronts. It transplants the action from Renaissance Italy to “Verona Beach” contemporary to the 1990s. Romeo + Juliet’s restaging is possibly more drastic than that.

Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story by William Shakespeare