RJ

I volunteered as a teen for the Canadian Stage’s annual Shakespeare in the park, back in the days when we merely asked people to pay what they could and stood around watching them do so. You have to buy tickets now. This summer is Romeo and Juliet, with the final familial reconciliation chopped off. Perhaps it’s more emotionally satisfying, to end the story once everyone we care about is dead. And yet only the unlikely-seeming final reconciliation turns it from a comedy of avoidable errors into something you could imagine as a heroic origin story, a play that could be performed at generations of Montague and Capulet entertainments to moralize that the price of peace has already been paid in childrens’ blood, spectators placed outside the story instead of continuing participants in it.

Thinking about a post I saw somwehere of a teacher who asked her students to create music videos using clips from the 1996 film, where a critical mass of students decided on Taylor Swift’s Love Story as the musical backdrop, a de-tragification worthy of a Soviet ballet. The only part of that song that I can readily call to mind is the climactic modulation, a musical theatre sort of device, marry me, Juliet, you’ll never have to be alone– hold on, their problem wasn’t that they weren’t married, right, unless I misunderstood very gravely. Also the line, in Juliet’s narration, you’ll be the prince and I’ll be the princess, a deliberate assignment of pre-existing gender roles that starts to feel almost postmodern if you don’t think about it too hard. Raises somewhat the same question as the classic line from Sean Paul’s Temperature: And girl, I wanna be the papa, you can be the mom, oh-oh… had he been considering a different arrangement, before ultimately deciding on this as the final offer? Perhaps it’s ungenerous to assume not. Don’t worry, the other version is out there somewhere, where Juliet says yes, let’s marry, but only if I can be the prince and you’ll be the princess, oh-oh…