STAGE REVIEW : Something’s Amiss in ‘Romeo’ at Ensemble Studio Theatre

What has happened to the Ensemble Studio Theatre? It used to be a serious smaller theater, but its “Romeo and Juliet” is a workshop effort of no distinction whatsoever.

Director Jeff Miller does have an idea about the play, sort of. He wants to make it a today “Romeo and Juliet,” with the players dressed up in thrift-shop motley (by Roslyn Moore) and competing with their images on onstage TV screens, which are comically slow to warm up.

There are also references to “West Side Story.” Here, though, it’s Romeo (Esai Morales) who is Latino, and Juliet (Kim Gillingham), who is white. But Juliet’s nurse (Allyce Beasley) is right out of that show--she’s as skinny and tough as the Jets’ girl mascot, Anybody’s. An odd choice, when Shakespeare gets so much fun from the nurse’s being fat and out of breath.

But it might have worked had director Miller been able to give Beasley some kind of line to play. She ends up burlesquing the part and herself, a sign that something’s seriously adrift at the heart of the show.

According to the program, it’s Miller’s first professional directing job. Clearly he has had to put most of his effort into moving the players around and making sure that the audience is looking in the right place--and there are problems with that in the crowd scenes.

The emotional flow has to be left to the actors, and they are too busy counting out Shakespeare’s lines to find any. They get most of the lines right, but they are clearly dealing with a foreign language here, and the question of living those lines rarely comes up.

It’s like watching a performance of “Swan Lake” danced by a company whose training has mostly been in jazz or tap. They don’t known the style, and their own native vitality gets damped down in their attempt to capture it. Morales, for example, was terrific a couple of seasons ago as the street kid in “Tamer of Horses” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, but we have to take his Romeo chiefly on trust.

Gillingham’s Juliet is even less vivid. Juliet’s cousin Tybalt does get a neat performance from Rick Biggs, but everyone else is bound up with what kind of an impression he’s making (note how seldom the characters look at each other) and it’s a long night for a viewer who wants to lose himself in the world of the play.

Workshop productions of this sort are valuable in giving the actors a stretch, but it’s folly to expect an audience to pay $15 a seat for them. We expect more from this theater and we used to get it.

Plays Wednesdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 3 p.m., at 1089 N. Oxford Ave. Closes Oct. 16. Tickets $16. (213) 466-2916.

‘ROMEO AND JULIET’

Shakespeare’s tragedy, at Ensemble Studio Theatre. Director Jeff Miller. Set Clifton R. Welch. Lighting and sound design Philip G. Allen. Costumes Roslyn Moore. Original music Corey Allen. Dance choreography Tami Hunter. Film Black Cat Productions. Special effects Dave Cohen. Production coordinator Michele Miller. Production stage manager Cari Norton. Producer Jon Lawrence Rivera. With Kate Fitzmaurice, Dean Fortunato, John Dixon, Benjamin Moulton, Sasha Jenson, Dave Smith, Rick Biggs, Tom Fuccello, Dianne Turley Travis, Will Carney, Casey Kramer, Layne Beamer, Esai Morales, John Dixon, Allyce Beasley, Jennifer Kaplan, Jamye Stracener,, Kim Gillingham, Lance Edwards, Tami Hunter, Michael Halliday.