Every once in a while, if you’re a parent, you have this snapshot moment of your child’s life. One moment they’re two years old and sinking their teeth into the tender soft flab of your underarm as you carry them toward the car, and the next they’re adult-sized, striding across a shadowy stage in knee-high boots, sword drawn, about to fight to the death over a girl. The toddler-sized bite mark scar you carry is but a foreshadowing of this moment: when your child again has the power to capture the entirety of your attention.
Camp Encore’s riveting steampunk version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, staged last week, kept audience members on the edge of their seats. With music by Aeryn Goldstein and David Gardner heightening the intensity of the emotion and the action, the teen actors brought Romeo and Juliet to life with fervor. A drama camp for teenagers, Camp Encore requires that teens learn the lines, blocking and emoting in just four short weeks from the first day, getting to know each other, to the last of their three performances. In addition, some of the campers paint the set or design and create props. Deftly directed and encouraged by Kate Magill Robinson, this year’s group of campers put on one of the most dynamic productions yet.
The chorus, dressed in sophisticated red and black, opened the play speaking the prologue and appeared throughout singing haunting original songs and published poems put to music by the two composers. Audience member 13-year-old Kayla Cunningham, visiting Greenbelt from Tennessee, said the “background music was perfect! It really goes along with the scenes.” While the drum beats at times obscured the words of the quieter actors, the drum beats heightened the menacing energy when they matched increasing heart rates during a violent argument. Goldstein’s sweet Marriage Blessing in the background of the wedding scene morphed into Faithful Friend’s darker drama to match Tybalt’s (Sean Brittan-Powell) angry stalking, bent on death, into the scene.
Read more of this story in the July 20 News Review
