Word: mercutio
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That would be a mistake in any play of Shakespeare's, but Romeo and Juliet suffers cruelly. Shakespeare frolics in the verbal exuberance of his youth in each of the play's celebrated passages. Like Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech, Romeo and Juliet studies insubstantiality, considering love as the product of words, not acts. After all, there isn't much in the plot to convince an audience of the worth of the love between Romeo and Juliet: a kiss at a masked ball, a nighttime encounter, a secret marriage, and one night together are its only substance...
Jonathan Prince's Mercutio is equally smooth but much less ingenuous. Prince pays attention to what he says, but should learn that the moment of stillness is as valuable to an actor as the gesture. He accompanies each line in the "Queen Mab" speech with a fidget, wave, or wriggle of the hips and ends up irritating instead of captivating. Alexander C. Pearson gives Friar Laurence a good, hammy performance, suitably gawkish, well-intentioned and incompetent, but by the end he gets sucked into the general failure...
David Rounds' Mercutio just doesn't cut the mustard. I suppose it's all right for him to be half-sighted, with a black patch over one eye. But he must not talk at half speed; after all, he "will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month." Yet Rounds delivers his delicate and dazzling "Queen Mab" aria in a leaden manner, with lots of pauses. Vivace has become andante. I've said before--and I repeat--that the best guide here is the Queen Mab vocal scherzetto and orchestral scherzo from Berlioz's symphony...
...same time one of the dirtiest in its diction. It teems with smutty puns that would get the work banned by highschool teachers and boards of education if these folks were really up on their Elizabethan lingo. The bulk of the bawdry issues from the mouths of Mercutio and the Nurse, who are the foils to Romeo and Friar Laurence. Kahn has a lot of the phallic and other ribaldry indicated through gesture or mime...
...over a flounder rather than a young girl losing the world and her dear life for love. David Birney's Romeo is so limp and bland that it comes as a wondrous surprise that he has either the will or strength to climb to Juliet's balcony. Mercutio, that man from whom words flow like liquid light, emerges in David Rounds' rendering as little more than a stand-up nightclub comic...