For one thing, Frears has the actors race so quickly through the text that it sometimes seems as if they're embarrassed by the words: ``Let's just get this flowery bit over with, and then we can fight again." Perhaps this, like the deep cutting that reduces the running time to about 2 1/2 hours, is meant to reassure the young or unschooled audiences that too many theaters are afraid of scaring off if they present Shakespeare with a straight face.
The problem, though, is that skimming over the poetry makes it less accessible, not more. When the actors don't engage deeply with every word, neither can we. And then the text becomes exactly what such productions are most afraid of: a pointlessly elaborate ornament, crammed with strange words twisted together in unfamiliar ways, rather than the complex but muscular and profoundly meaningful dramatic language that Shakespeare actually wrote.
Here this mistaken approach is particularly damaging to Lysy's Romeo, who sounds by turns sheepish and bewildered about the weird words he's inexplicably uttering. Yes, Romeo should be a slightly foolish boy, but he has to be a romantic dreamer, not a baffled lug. When we hear Benvolio, for example, telling Romeo that he mourns ``thy good heart's oppression," we should see a heart oppressed by the miseries of young love. Lysy just looks like a kid who's lost his skateboard.
Rossum's Juliet moons more persuasively, and the ``Phantom of the Opera" star's operatic training shows in the tone and control of her voice. But she, too, scants the meaning of the words; she skips and glides over even the most soul-stirring speeches, so that Juliet's vial of sleeping potion might as well be Fanta. And Rossum has the pop star's bad habit of courting the audience with an immovable, dazzling smile -- particularly jarring when she's begging her mother not to cast her away or bewailing Romeo's banishment.
