Juliet & Romeo

A pop music version of the Bard's most famous play may not be the film you were pining for. But despite variations from Shakespeare's text, it's a bright, breezy rendition teens might actually enjoy.

“Romeo and Juliet” is certainly William Shakespeare’s most enduring play — possibly the most famous piece of storytelling ever known to humankind. It’s been performed, parsed, revised, renditioned and just plain retold every which imaginable.

Cinematically, every generation seems to have their “own” version, with Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 “Romeo + Juliet” probably the last one to really make a pop culture imprint. A 2013 iteration featuring Hailee Steinfeld didn’t exactly hit.

So was a musical featuring synth-y pop music the version you were pining for? I’m guessing not. I’m also supposing Shakespeare purists will howl with outrage at the textual changes from the Bard’s original, not only pitching almost all of his dialogue but also some pretty… bold alterations to the plot. I’ll say no more.

Written and directed by Timothy Scott Bogart with music by E. Kidd Bogart — Timothy’s brother and a Grammy winner for writing Beyonce’s “Halo” — “Juliet & Romeo” features the very comely pair of Danish actress/singer Clara Rugaard and Australian actor Jamie Ward in the lead roles.

I’ll admit it took me awhile to settle in. The use of singing is a bit unconventional, in that sometimes they’ll burst into song for just 30 or 40 seconds rather than the usual 2-4 minute set piece. It’s almost used more like a garnish at a times than the main ingredient.

But it’s a beautiful, bright and breezy telling that I just couldn’t help indulging. This movie may be dismissed as a bubble gum version of “Romeo and Juliet,” but I’d also wager it has a better chance of actually being liked by young people — teens in particular — than a standard stage performance of the material.

Speaking of P.O.ing the cultural elites, I’ve said for some time now that “real” Shakespeare is dead for film adaptations, or should be. As I argued in my heretical take on Joel Coen’s 2021 “The Tragedy of Macbeth” — podcast here — the 425+ year old language is just too archaic and ornamental to be comprehended by regular audiences who haven’t spent a lifetime consuming it.

You expend so much of your mental bandwidth just trying to decipher what the hell everyone’s saying, there isn’t enough room left to really get into the emotionality of it. Facts: Shakespeare is better read than watched now.

There’s still some of the Bard’s flowery language in “J&R,” but for the most part people speak in normal conversational English. Maybe I’ve just got a head full of rocks, but for me the dumbing down made the storytelling more accessible.

You know the tale: in fair Verona circa 1301, the two ruling families of the Montagues and Capulets vie for control in the face of potential takeover of their city-state by the Catholic Church in Rome, with the nominally in charge Prince playing all sides. When first son of the Montagues, Romeo, falls for Juliet, daughter of the Capulets, it sets off a tragic conflict that ends with a lot of people dead, including both lovers.

Imagine that story with modern self-referential irony, and you’ll get an idea of what we’re in for. Early on when Juliet makes her entrance (after years away at school), she and the instantly smitten Romeo have this exchange:

“Was that a question?”

“No, that was an answer with a clever inflection at the end.”

I think if you smirk or roll your eyes at this point, your disposition toward the movie the rest of the way is sealed. I smiled.

There also a few other iconoclastic choices, like at one point a character is singing, grabs a candle and starts miming like it’s a microphone. You may be thinking, why would a 14th-century guy do this, since electrically amplified sound is still quite a ways off. Well, because it’s supposed to make him seem more like a modern pop singer.

The songs are not my kind of thing — quick-talk patter that inevitably breaks into high-octave crescendos, upbeat and hard to hum to. The voices (to my tin ear, at least) sound like they were given a heavy-handed digital “assist,” to the point when different characters pass the lyrics back and forth, I had trouble discerning between them.

Romeo mostly sings falsetto, with Juliet’s pitch actually below his much of the time. But Rugaard and Ward warble quite fetchingly, both separately and in duet.

Two tunes stuck out for me: “What If I Loved You,” an ensemble piece passed around by various romantic couples, and “Beat the Same,” featuring our star couple.

The supporting cast includes both winsome, largely unknown youngsters as well as some recognizable older faces, including some storied stage thespians well regarded for classical stagings of Shakespeare. This includes Derek Jacobi as The Friar, Rupert Everett as Lord Capulet and Jason Isaacs as his Montague counterpart.

Rebel Wilson plays Lady Capulet, and doesn’t that make us all feel old. Dan Fogler gets some good comic relief lines as The Apothecary, plying his trade for the 14th century version of the stoner clique. Nicholas Podany plays an especially mercurial take on Mercutio, and Ferdia Walsh-Peelo is both forbidding and charismatic as Tybalt.

I know, I know… for many, the alterations to the classic tale are going to be too much to swallow.

To make an analogy to one of my favorite genres, fantasy films, I’d say Shakespeare lovers should view “Juliet & Romeo” the way I did the “Harry Potter” books in comparison to “The Lord of the Rings.” It’s clearly an inferior imitation, but if it gets kids reading and thinking and loving this stuff, hopefully they’ll eventually graduate to the real thing.

That probably sounds condescending, and maybe it is. But if the tale of the two star-crossed lover is going to survive to the end of another millennium, you could do worse then embracing reflections like this on film.