Juliet & Romeo is the sort of film that schoolteachers wary about introducing Shakespeare to 16 year olds show to the kids. Sexy young things have key roles, the original language survives only as a vestige and there are songs that use autotune quite a bit. Purists will hate hate hate it, but it has a perky energy and its middle-finger approach means it actually fares a lot better than many a reworking.
It sticks close enough to the original plot – star crossed lovers from rival families in Verona. The Montagues and Capulets, headed on one side by Jason Isaacs and Lidia Vitale as Lord and Lady M, on the other by Rupert Everett and Rebel Wilson as Lord and Lady C. None of whom get much screen time and there as a soakaway for parental outrage, if anyone is really bothered about the bastardisation of the Bard any more.
So, yes, the two families at war, jostling for preferment from Rome, with Romeo and Juliet caught in the middle and trying to conduct a clandestine love affair, which leads to an untimely death in the Shakespeare version. Here, director and adapter Timothy Scott Bogart teases the same destiny for the lovers. But before revealing what he has in store for them entertains us with a “let’s do the show right here” musical done as if the screen were a stage. People hoof, they come to the front to sing, the guys in the lighting rigs use follow spots and everyone dresses in the kind of Disneyfied costumes that you get in a big Broadway show.
Running in the opposite direction is Bogart’s camera, always on the move, and with edits like a flickerbook, as if to deny the theatricality of it all. All the world’s a stage, Mr B, just go with it.
Tim’s brother Evan Kidd Bogart wrote the songs. There is one really good one – I Should Write This Down, which is not unadjacent to Be Our Guest from Beauty and the Beast. It’s bouncy and witty and it gives us a chance to see Derek Jacobi singing. Sort of. He’s more your Rex Harrison than Hugh Jackman, but he brings a certain dignity to the role of Friar Lawrence, the one who concocts the plan for the lovers to fake their deaths and escape their families’ eternal vendetta.
I should already have mentioned Jamie Ward and Clara Rugaard, who play Romeo and Juliet. You’ll know him as Jesus in The Last Supper but he’s really a stage bod, having done loads of stuff in London’s West End. (Like Les Mis – but then everyone’s done Les Mis.) Rugaard you’ll possibly know from playing… Juliet Capulet in Still Star-Crossed, a TV show telling the same story. No one seemed to watch it so maybe you won’t. Both do what’s necessary, which seems like faint praise but really there’s so much going on the whole time that making any impact at all is hard work.
With varying degrees of fealty to the Shakespearean ideal, the likes of Ferdia Walsh-Pelo, Rupert Graves, Nicholas Podany and Dennis Andres flesh out other roles, with Andres a pretty good Paris, beefy and mean. Standout of the side characters is Dan Fogler as the apothecary, who comes into his own later on. You get the sense that Fogler would be good at Shakespeare done for real, even though his apothecary is introduced selling weed on the streets.
That sort of thing will make some people vibrate with fury, of course, so proceed with beta blockers if you fall into that category. Lovers of the poetry of Shakespeare’s language aren’t likely to be impressed either (usual pedant’s note: “wherefore” does not mean “where”). And the sort of people who blow their stack over anachronism and colour-blind casting should probably have meds on standby too.
For everyone else, this is a light, bright, tuneful, sometimes ridiculous, knowingly crass lark, done with a dressing-up-box aesthetic. Overall, the vibe is pop promo. 1980s pop promo in fact. I half expected Adam Ant to surface at any minute.
Juliet & Romeo – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
