on friday evening and saturday afternoon, i witnessed two performances of with shakespeare in the park, namely romeo and juliet and a midsummer night’s dream. the performances took place in prince’s island park, which i already displayed twice in this blog. both plays were near to the original text, but in a modernized setting. i enjoyed both a lot!
i did not have my camera with me while watching romeo and juliet, but i had it with me for a midsummer night’s dream. here are some impressions:

just watched romeo must die (imdb), yet another adaption of the romeo and juliet theme. this time, two gangs, one black and one chinese, are fighting for domination. differently from the classic story, romeo and juliet (r.i.p.) are not really part of this scenery, but are sucked inside when their siblings are killed. the film features lots of kung fu, has many funny scenes, and plays plenty of hip hop, which isn’t exactly favorite music style, but fits pretty well.
while watching a friend of mine typed on icq that this one is really good. he’s so right.

i just watched william shakespeare‘s romeo and juliet, or, more precisely, baz luhrmann‘s 1996 interpretation romeo + juliet (imdb). i must admit that i only knew few crumbs of the story, but have never read it nor saw it as a play or movie before. (though i’ve been in verona at the house which is claimed to have been capulet’s, seeing there a bronze statue of juliet.)
i think there’s no need to spend many words on the story. there’s love, there’s hate, there’s death. tragedy. love and death, going hand in hand once more.
the movie transports the old tale into the new world. guns instead of swords. cars instead of horses. even though, the dialogue has not been touched: besides a few omissions, it’s shakespeare‘s original one. that made me turn on the subtitles after the first few words, fearing to miss something important, even though i stopped looking at them after a short time. it’s the most successful adaption of an old tale which i’ve seen so far; i usually tend to dislike or at least being annoyed by such modernizations.
while listening, i noticed that the soundtrack includes garbage‘s #1 crush, a song i like a lot. another familar tune showed up, with the ending credits, namely radiohead‘s exit music (for a film). it’s time to listen to them again…
to sum it up: it’s beautiful. absolutely. touched me, deeply.
good night.