SOURCE: Hampton, Wilborn. Review of Romeo and Juliet. New York Times (15 August 2001): E5.

In the following review of Terrence O'Brien's Romeo and Juliet for the 2001 Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Hampton finds the staging uneven in terms of both individual performances and O'Brien's mostly comic directorial additions to the play.

One of the more persistent peculiarities of American culture has been the insatiable urge of actors, directors and audiences to pass hot summer nights congregating in city parks or country meadows for performances of the plays of William Shakespeare. Pioneered almost half a century ago by Joseph Papp and his New York Shakespeare Festival, the notion that declaiming Elizabethan blank verse is as much a part of summer as ice cream or watermelon has now grown into a national tradition.

For New Yorkers, one of the more bucolic settings for observing this ritual is the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival...