SOURCE: Christon, Lawrence. “Romeo & Juliet.” Variety 382, no. 6 (26 March 2001): 56.

In the review below, Christon discusses the 2001 Center Theater Group/Ahmanson Theater production of Romeo and Juliet directed by Peter Hall. Christon's review is mixed, as he points out that some performances were weak, but despite this, the pace of the play never slowed, nor did the production as a whole seem “ragged.”

Whatever square the blank oval windows of set designer John Gunter's pale palazzo front are supposed to oversee, it isn't quite in the Verona of Shakespeare's “Romeo and Juliet,” where hot-blooded Italians, constrained by hierarchy, tradition and proximity, view one another with inflammatory suspicion. Instead, the play is cast in the theatrical never-neverland of multicultural America, where people of many races stand in the living moment, stripped of the antecedent that flavors their identity.

Most of the time this kind of experiment doesn't work, because most people...