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by William Shakespeare, adapted by Landon Doak & Iain Moggach, directed by Iain Moggach

Theatre on the Ridge, Scugog Shores Museum Village, Port Perry

June 17–July 5, 2026

Mercutio: “This is that very Mab

That plats the manes of horses in the night,

And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,

Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes”

“Go wisely and slowly; those who rush stumble and fall”, Friar Laurence warns Romeo, who has fallen madly in love overnight. What’s more, he has fallen for the daughter of his family’s rival — an enemy, by any other name. Romeo is neither wise nor slow. Quite the opposite: he is young.

For all its poetry and bloodshed, Shakespeare’s tragedy is, at heart, a teen drama. Juliet is 13, while Romeo is usually imagined as about 17. They are both impulsive adolescents swept up by the headlong recklessness of a life not yet touched by consequence. Director Iain Moggach understands this beautifully in his summer production for Theatre on the Ridge. From the moment the ensemble — Shannon Pitre, Kieran Prouty, Elm Reyes, Hilary Wheeler, Michael Williamson — welcomes the audience with country-inflected songs, the evening’s spirit of lighthearted play is unmistakable.

Such youthful heat is enhanced by the production’s open-air setting. Theatre on the Ridge’s semi-permanent tent creates a continuity between stage and landscape. Surrounded by greenery, the space lets sunlight seep inside, illuminating the actors along with the stage lights. The diamond-shaped stage juts toward the audience, adding to the playful intimacy. So does the set design: a backdrop of mismatched curtains, patched together like the travelling kit of an old itinerant troupe, with strings of lights hanging above.

Script adapters Landon Doak and Moggach have cut Shakespeare’s text to only 90 minutes, with some passages transformed into song. The story is therefore the old one. In Verona, two rival households, the Montagues and the Capulets, are locked in a feud so bitter that even their children inherit its violence. Against that world, Romeo and Juliet fall in love too quickly and too completely, risking everything for a desire the world around them refuses to allow.

Besides the adaptation’s quicksilver pace, this low-tech staging requires real musical dexterity from the cast. Performers constantly shift between character and musical accompaniment, taking turns at playing the cello, violin, classical guitar, ukulele or cajón. The score by Doak gives the production its buoyant tone, its twang-laced songs offering the evening’s most suspended and poetic moments. From the Queen Mab speech to the young couple’s first encounter, music becomes part of the production’s emotional vocabulary — an emblem of adolescence’s uncontrolled rush.

In fact, whenever adult authority closes in, the characters instinctively hide their instruments. We see this when the Prince (Pitre) orders the feuding households to lay down their weapons, and the ensemble sets its instruments down onstage. Later, when Capulet (Reyes) comes to speak with Juliet, the Nurse first makes sure to hide the girl’s ukulele from him. Youth, here, is music; adulthood is the force that makes the music stop.

The cast’s unvarnished energy is both the production’s asset and its occasional limitation. While there were moments when the performers delivered their lines with real freshness and youthful energy, there were others when the acting felt amateurish, with performances still settling into full theatrical ease and movement sequences lacking polish.

At its best, Shakespeare’s words crackle in the quick, vivid mouths of these strikingly fresh-faced performers: Mercutio (Prouty) and Benvolio (Wheeler) erupt into a rowdy roar of celebratory mockery after learning Romeo has lost his virginity, while the Nurse (Pitre), impish and teasing, inches cheekily across the stage complaining of back pain and tormenting the impatient Juliet by delaying news about Romeo.

Ben Ridd and Una Roulston make for sweet-natured protagonists. Ridd is ardent, his cheeks constantly flushing whenever anger rises in him. Roulston, by contrast, is a level-headed yet wilful Juliet. When she learns of Tybalt’s death, she resists the current of events, reaching for adult composure in a moment of emotional incandescence.

For all the joy Moggach draws from the production, he also threads in moments of eerie foreboding. The recurring appearance of a masked woman in an emerald-green dress (Pitre) darkens the evening’s lightness. First introduced as Queen Mab, the cryptic figure of Mercutio’s famous speech, she is reimagined here as something more ominous. She reappears at the couple’s marriage and then at Mercutio’s death, becoming the dark star crossing these lovers’ path: less a bringer of dreams than an agent of fate.

Her unspoken premonition is fulfilled toward the end, when the Nurse finds Juliet’s body in her bed. Faced with the collision between Juliet’s former youthful vigour and the blunt reality of her death, the Nurse folds into silent grief: shoulders tense, breath caught high in her chest, and pain held in. The production’s rhythm, until then centrifugal and impetuous, suddenly stops.

But Moggach and Doak refuse to leave us only with death. They close the show as it began: with actors singing and playing together, smiling out at the audience in a sincere moment that cuts through the tragedy. What remains is Shakespeare’s “sweet sorrow”: the ache of looking back at youth before the world made it heavy.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photos: Una Roulston, Kieran Prouty, Ben Ridd, Michael Williamson, Hilary Wheeler, Elm Reyes and Shannon Pitre; Una Roulston as Juliet and Ben Ridd as Romeo; Una Roulston as Juliet and Elm Reyes as Capulet. © 2026 Barry McCluskey.

For tickets visit: theatreontheridge.ca.