We've got a new version of Romeo and Juliet coming to the stage and the casting is ... well, it's got people talking.
The Jamie Lloyd Company today announced the full cast for the upcoming West End production of Romeo & Juliet, with newcomer Francesca Amewudah-Rivers confirmed as Juliet opposite Tom Holland...
Amewudah-Rivers previously appeared in two seasons of BBC series Bad Education and three short films. She has stage experience in productions at the Globe and Lyric Hammersmith among other venues. The Daily Mail had speculated on her casting in recent weeks.
A lot of people are getting salty about Juliet being black, while I'm over here wondering how Spider-Man is going to play Romeo.
Wrong?
Yeesh. I think we've become a little too primed toward rage, don't ya think?
I hate it when Hollywood or Broadway tries to shoehorn in diversity for diversity's sake, but let's be honest here. This is a work of fiction that isn't primarily focused on medieval Italian history and culture. You could take Romeo and Juliet and pluck them out of Verona, Italy, and plop them down in any city at any time in any culture and the story still works.
Or did everyone complaining forget about the wildly popular 1996 adaptation that set the play in the modern day?
That's not true for all works of fiction, like Lord of the Rings. It certainly isn't true for stories depicting actual historical characters:
Theater is also a good place to use cast members that don't necessarily look like their roles.
(Boy actor Robert Gough was likely the first to play Juliet, after all.)
Theater is different than a movie, where everything on the screen must look like a certain time and place to immerse the viewer in the experience. The pacing is different. The style is different. The audience is different.
Holland said today: "Beyond excited to announce our cast for Romeo and Juliet. I can't wait to get started and I know we'll create something really special together."
Francesca Amewudah-Rivers added: "I'm so grateful to be making my West End debut as Juliet with The Jamie Lloyd Company. It's a dream to be joining this team of incredible artists with Jamie at the helm. I'm excited to bring a fresh energy to this story alongside Tom, and to welcome new audiences to the theatre."
See, the problem starts when the theater kids start breaking cinema by forcing things that work on stage into a $400-million blockbuster, then add all their ideological beliefs on top of it, so a film about 13th-century England feels like it's set in 2024 Santa Monica.
And those theater kids, lemme tell ya, they need Jesus right now.
Wokeness is a virus that infects and destroys everything it touches, but let's wait until the play comes out to judge this one.
