Updated Shakespeare is all the rage since the days of doing Hamlet in modern dress, or the nude version. We have seen and enjoyed everything from Richard III to Coriolanus in updated fashion.
A few years back we offered a course in Updated Shakespeare to English majors, and we found a growing army of updated tales on film, whether it was Much Ado about Nothing or A Midsummer Night's Dream.
We even loved Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo and Juliet, and we came with some trepidation to something called Private Romeo.
The premise seemed a mite strained. A few cadets at a military academy are left alone at the campus, fending for themselves while the officers and other cadets are off on maneuvers. In one class the stranded and bereft young cadets are studying Shakespeare's romantic tragedy, and they seem to begin to live it.
The idea is not so far-fetched, as the original play deals with young hothead teenage gang members in rival factions. There is a secret love story interwoven among the hostilities and budding male adolescent angst.
So it is in Private Romeo. The shock of the rival gangs over Romeo's love may be more palatable because the forbidden affair is with another cadet. We found the Shakespearean dialog most apt to cover the situation.
The idea of first-love being misguided and overly passionate may befit a gay tale of coming out among cadets.
We can forgive a small budget movie stretching its wings, and we can even forgive a half dozen cadets looking like the Glee Club, not future ROTC members. Apart from that, the story picks up steam under director Alan Brown.
Scenes from R&J are cleverly woven into conversations about Romeo's unorthodox military affair. Action plays out on basketball court and chemistry lab. Like Elizabethan times, male actors play female roles like Nurse and Juliet's mother, this time in the guise of young cadets. The actors handle multiple roles and dialog is lifted from Shakespeare to meet the situation.
This brave effort features Matt Doyle as Cadet Mangan and his alter ego Juliet. Doyle is soft and vulnerable, but hardly feminine or in drag. Seth Numrich plays Cadet Singleton and Romeo. They are commendable.
If all male casts disturb you, you would not have been able to appreciate Shakespeare's work played by all male casts in the writer's lifetime.
