Romeo does not rock

Last night one of my theatrical nightmares came true. They turned a Shakespeare tragedy into a dire musical, a sort of softrock affair, so soft there was more mush than music, more slop than soul. I'd often dreamed of how preposterous it would be to hear, say Hamlet, moodily singing "Should I want to be be me anymore? Is it nobler to shuffle off now," or Lady Macbeth's "Hey there, Mr Spirit Man, could you come and unsex me right here." Don Black, who wrote the ponderous lyrics for Romeo And Juliet The Musical, with director David Freeman helping him out on the plodding book, has taken this sort of nightmare route.

They have set their musical in roughly contemporary England, which makes Juliet's arranged marriage at 14 very odd. Verona is represented by back-projections and the action is vigorously staged on climbing frames and steps. The feuding Capulets and Montagues keep dancing themselves into rage. But Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet text has been replaced with banal, up-tothe-moment diction. "Here goes," is all Lorna Want's unusually youthful, longhaired Juliet says before drinking the potion that will put her into a death-like sleep. When it comes to songs, and oh how unfortunately often it does, music and lyrics are frequently inane. As Andrew Bevis's wimpy Romeo climbs up to Juliet's balcony, which is all adorned with grapes, the music by Gerard Presgurvic sedately plods in his wake and the lovers ridiculously put their passion into words with "I'm not prepared to say goodbye until the day I die."

Black's a famous lyricist, but at every turn he brings Shakespeare's high verse slithering down to clichè's lower depths. "Only so much you can take, The strongest mountains often shake," Michael Cormick's snarling Prince warns us after Mercutio's death. And how can you believe in a Juliet who sings "I must learn to curb my adolescent ways"? Presgurvic clearly does not believe in music that stirs or excites. While Leonard Bernstein wrote a sexy, searing, jazzy score for West Side Story that suitably transferred Romeo And Juliet to downtown America, Presgurvic's music too often remains cocooned in mellifluous decorum, mooning and moaning, with little variety, violence or menace.

There are even faint but persistent echoes of Alain Boublil's and Claude-Michel Schonberg's Les MisËrables. The murder of Rachid Sabitri's stodgy Mercutio only thrills because of the menace of the fatal fight scene that Malcolm Ranson organised. Sexual desire, the play's goading factor, hardly looms large or vigorous. The teenage stars put up valiant, committed performances. And Miss Want's timid, put-upon, childlike Juliet is as affecting as inept songs and dialogue allow. But sexual desire never drives them to anything much at all. Dempsey's helpless Romeo wears a constant look of bewilderment, and leather trousers that he doesn't remove in bed with Juliet. Their singing is more hopeful than heartfelt or erotic.

Sadly Alexis James's ferocious Tybalt, Matt Dempsey's swaggering Benvolio, Jane McDonald's brisk nurse and Sevan Stephan's camply operatic Friar Lawrence cannot save this Romeo And Juliet from being sunk by its ridiculousness.

Romeo And Juliet The Musical is at The Piccadilly

Romeo & Juliet