Sam Gold is a Brooklyn-based director who received critical acclaim for his work on Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” “Hamlet” and “Othello.” On Sept. 26, Gold is bringing “Romeo and Juliet” to the Circle in the Square theater, starring Kit Connor as Romeo and Rachel Zegler as Juliet.
“I’ve been cycling through major tragedies. I’ve been going through all of them, and this is the last one for me,” Gold said. “I’ve been on an eight-year exploration of Shakespeare’s great tragedies. They speak to the world right now, and they feel like the best way for me, as an artist, to explore what it means to be alive right now.”
Gold’s adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet,” which features music by Jack Antonoff of The Bleachers and choreography by Sonya Tayeh, is the director’s way of connecting to a younger audience through theater. Gold’s directorial work on “An Enemy of the People,” starring Jeremy Strong of “Succession” fame and Michael Imperioli from “The Sopranos” and “The White Lotus,” drew a younger crowd and was well-received online, which ignited an interest in Gen Z theater-goers for Gold.
“We had a very young audience for ‘Enemy of the People,’ and I was really moved by how a play that was thinking about an older society, but which had major cultural, social, political ramifications about today, was really hitting young people,” said Gold. “I felt that young people needed a meaty exploration of the of some of the large things that people are going through right now. Theater provides something a lot of other cultural mediums aren’t providing — this very deep, intense, full, complicated, nuanced exploration of what it means to be alive right now, and I could just feel young people really hungry for it.”
Since the youthful reception to “An Enemy of the People,” Gold developed “Romeo and Juliet” to target the fears and anxieties of…
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