With the matinee of Dracula cancelled at the last minute, I am a bit more refreshed for a nap in time to head into London later than expected for Romeo and Juliet. This one fits into a weird limbo zone, in that there is to some degree stunt casting (Noah Jupe and Sadie Sink respectively) but that’s not why I’m here (I like Jupe enough, but can’t say I made a beeline here for him, and I’ve never watched Stranger Things, so…). So really I’m just here because I want to see Romeo and Juliet. I broadly get that? I’m not fully sold on the whole thing, but didn’t hate it. Most of the cast are saying the words but not really imbuing them with meaning - it feels like recitation more than performance. The revelation, though, is Sadie Sink, sitting somewhere between Emma Stone in Easy A and Emma Stone in La La Land (it’s not just the red hair, honest). “Wherefore art thou [etc.]” is delivered with such heart and angst, it’s a joy to behold. The staging is minimal but effective - the use of implied space in creating a nightclub scene is a lot of fun. There are two end-of-act needle drops, one horribly on the nose (“I Don’t Like Mondays” indeed), but Adrienne Lenker’s “not a lot just forever” is done to great effect at the end of the play (the hard cut on “so I bash around the house and the poison stains my mouth”, divine). The most baffling element is the introduction in the first half of a strobe-light time reversal effect, detailing how else scenes could have played out. It’s not very well integrated into the rest of the staging, and in a play whose finale lives and dies on the idea of the tragedy of what else could have been, this effect is utterly wasted by the end. Deeply confusing. I enjoyed it with reservations, but at least it’s something to think about.