In Of Montreal, Robert Everett-Green writes weekly about the people, places and events that make Montreal a distinctive cultural capital.
Boundary-jumping is a well-established thing at summer music festivals, where it's normal to see R&B bands on a folk stage or hip-hop musicians at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal. For many festivals, spreading a wide net is central to both mandate and business plan.
Juste pour rire/Just for Laughs (JPR) welcomes all kinds of stand-up comedians, and, this year, some classical tragedians as well. The organization that runs Canada's major comedy festival is listed as co-producer of Théâtre du Nouveau Monde's current French-language run of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. That may be the least-expected creative hookup since JPR recruited Internet porn site PornHub as a sponsor of its "dirty comics" series, The Nasty Show.
JPR has been involved with musical comedy in Montreal for several years, presenting shows such as this year's Mary Poppins and Footloose. Any move from that base toward Shakespeare would have been a surprise, although comedies such as Much Ado About Nothing can still kill, as they say in the stand-up world.
It's a little harder to send 'em out laughing with a feel-bad teen romance that ends with both lovers dead. In a program note, JPR founding president Gilbert Rozon explained his choice by saying that the play is "too rarely seen." It's actually one of Shakespeare's most-often performed works, although TNM hasn't done it since 1999.
Rozon might also have pointed out that Romeo and Juliet is sprinkled with dick jokes. Many of these pass unnoticed by audiences at English-language productions, because they're couched in Elizabethan slang and archaic double-entendres.
Almost the whole point of the play's opening exchange between two members of the Capulet clan is to trade dick jokes, and one rape joke. The Bard was sometimes not that far from the sensibility of The Nasty Show's comics.
Romeo and Juliet is an odd, hybrid sort of play, which begins like a comedy and ends in blood. It's the opposite of The Tempest, which opens as a revenge drama and ends with a wedding – the customary closing ritual of Shakespearean comedy.
There are a lot of comic opportunities in Romeo and Juliet's first half, and only a postal delay stands between the lovers and a happy ending. For much of its English performance history, in fact, the play was known mainly through a heavily altered version that concluded with both lovers alive and their families reconciled.
For this production, veteran director Serge Denoncourt has set the action in 1930s Italy, which allows much of the cast to wear fab flowing casual wear and sexy black uniforms. Act I includes a tribute to the late François Barbeau, whose costume designs from several past TNM productions appear in the ball scene.
Denoncourt has also juiced up the comedy in the first half. During Tuesday's performance, the play's clowns ran away with the show at every opportunity, led by Juliet's Nurse (played by Debbie Lynch-White), whose bawdy stories and obtuse asides were filled to bursting with expert physical comedy.
For whole chunks of the first half, you could imagine yourself at a Noel Coward drawing room comedy. Romeo (Philippe Thibault-Denis) teetered on the edge of parody, as a pouty teen amusing his friends with displays of unrequited puppy love for the never-seen Rosaline. He made his many approaches to Juliet's window by scrambling comically up a steep ramp, which designer Guillaume Lord used in other scenes as a doored wall or canopy.
The play as presented has been cut, which is normal, although it's rare to see a theatre trim the first exchange between Romeo and Juliet, which runs a mere 18 lines. In English, the first 14 of those lines are a Shakespearean sonnet, presented as a spontaneous but formally perfect improvisation. Nothing else more fully proves the deep and instant connection between these two. It was strange not to hear it this time, nor a line of iambic pentameter the whole evening, although no French translator could deliver that without doing violence to the language.
Romeo's pal Mercutio (Benoît McGinnis) drew his first laughs by appearing in a divalicious red gown, with the bodice pulled down and red lipstick on his nipples. He also sang a sentimental Italian song from the 1930s (Parlami d'amore Mariu), and alluded playfully to Hamlet's soliloquy.
Quebec playwright Normand Chaurette, whose 1999 French translation is used in this production, alludes to "evidence of sexual complicity" between Romeo and Mercutio, in his 2011 book on translation, Comment tuer Shakespeare. Denoncourt and McGinnis amplified this idea into a doomed passion on Mercutio's side, which Romeo seemed not to notice. In the end, Mercutio literally ran onto the point of Tybalt's dagger, dying not through Romeo's unlucky intervention, as Shakespeare has it, but from suicidal desperation. Suddenly all the character's reckless joking appeared as a veil drawn over a second love tragedy, at least as heavy as the main one.
The play's comic energies always die with Mercutio, who in this production also prepared the way for a drastic shift in the moral landscape. Romeo didn't just take up swords with Tybalt (Mikhaïl Ahooja) to avenge his friend's death – which, remember, was a suicide – but caught his unarmed opponent and ran him through the guts. You didn't have to be a Capulet to call the boy out as a murderer.
The just-for-laughs part definitely ended there. And while Marianne Fortier lent plausible heft to Juliet's unflinching extremism in adversity, the rest of the performance slid almost mechanically toward the catastrophe.
Even so, the large crowd at Tuesday's show gave it a strong ovation, which could be a favourable portent for more summer appearances of plays by le grand Will at TNM. Who knows, next year we may see the Juste pour rire co-production of Titus Andronicus.