Visually Appealing and Entertaining Action

The play I’m reviewing is Romeo y Julieta, performed at the Glacier Middle School gym by Seattle Shakespeare. The play takes place in Italy with Spanish and English dialogue, where the story of Romeo and Juliet’s forbidden love is shown. The play Romeo y Julieta has tough dialogue, but the actions of the play make it easier to understand.

Romeo & Julieta's families despise each other; therefore it is just a common fact that there should be no interaction between the two. But the more Romeo and Juliet secretly talked, the more they fell for each other, choosing love over family in the long run.

The dialogue of Romeo y Julieta was difficult to keep up with and understand. The play was in Spanish and in English making the conversations very difficult to understand because my mind couldn’t process the switch of language, so personally, I couldn’t focus on what they were saying in English or Spanish. They also spoke very fast which didn’t make understanding the conversations any easier. I think that since the characters were speaking so fast, many students had a hard time paying attention to the play itself and were only watching visually instead of listening in as well. Since this was the case for many students, like I said, we were focusing on the visual aspect of the play.

The play Romeo y Julieta performed by Seattle Shakespeare was more entertaining action-wise/visually and helped me understand the play more. Throughout the play, I noticed that people mainly paid attention to visually pleasing or scenes with action. The play had tough dialogue and was very hard to understand, but when I looked at what the characters were doing I sort of understood what was going on. Romeo y Julieta had more people listening and understanding the play during the action scenes rather than the whole play.

With all of my observations of the play and the audience, I believe that the play Romeo y Julieta is very difficult to understand but if you view the actions of the characters it helps you understand more of what the characters are saying and their main point.

Lead photo credit: Romeo y Julieta by Seattle Shakespeare Company. Photo by Christian Zumbado.

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This review was written as part of an Arts Criticism workshop at Glacier Middle School in Mr. Carlyle Language Arts classes, taught by Press Corps teaching artist Marquicia Dominguez.