SOURCE: Weber, Bruce. Review of Romeo and Juliet. New York Times (26 September 2001): E5.

In the following review, Weber praises Emily Mann's “fresh and inviting” 2001 production of Romeo and Juliet at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey, noting the adolescent exuberance of the cast and engaging pace of the performance.

Veronese teenagers in the time of Shakespeare may well have behaved with a different decorum from today's Americans. but that doesn't mean they weren't equally in the thrall of newly rampaging hormones. For contemporary audiences—particularly young audiences—one of the more straining aspects of Romeo and Juliet is the verbal eloquence that literature's twitchiest adolescents are able to muster even as they ache to scratch the primordial itch.

In Emily Mann's perky production of this paradigmatic romantic tragedy at the McCarter Theater here, the twain meet in Shakespearean poetry delivered by actors in distinctly modern pose. And...