Broadway’s Romeo And Juliet Review

Last year's Broadway run of Shakespeare’s great love story is immortalised here on film, with all the strengths and weaknesses you might expect of a straight theatre lift. There’s a tendency to declaim to the back rows, and the sets are, of course, stagey. But Orlando Bloom is a pleasantly unlikable Romeo — callow, brash and impetuous — while Condola Rashad is his match as a girlish, flighty Juliet. Their love story therefore has the ring of truth as well as tragedy, and the inevitable end is a sort of maturing assumption of responsibility as well as a declaration of devotion.