It is theater, it is desire: Julieta & Romeo unleashes Romina Richi’s creative force

The theater experience begins before the curtain rises in Romina Richi’s Julieta & Romeo. Reaching the Saldías Polo Cultural in Buenos Aires means leaving the usual cultural circuit, walking through a building filled with posters, graffiti and graphic signs, and taking in a setting that evokes 1990s Berlin or a more peripheral New York.

Inside, Leonora Balcarce plays a narrator and demiurge who introduces the audience to a production that is not a conventional adaptation of Shakespeare. Instead, it reads and rereads his theatrical universe. The dramatic pretext is Juliet’s birthday party, attended by Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Richard III, Caliban, Ophelia, Hamlet and other iconic figures.

When Romeo and Juliet begins, under the title Julieta & Romeo, the best-known characters from Shakespeare’s tragedy drive the plot and action. The performance is deliberately expansive, mixing acting, dance, singing and live music in a production that embraces excess rather than restraint.

The staging recalls the early 1990s Buenos Aires theater scene, when projects often combined desire, eroticism and openly expressed sexuality with an unruly creative energy. The review compares that spirit to Muscari’s work from that period, suggesting that passion and love of theater, rather than money, power the show.

Richi writes and directs the production, which runs for 90 minutes. Performances are scheduled for Sept. 5 and 12 at 8 p.m. at Saldías Polo Cultural, San Pedro de Jujuy 101. The review’s verdict is positive.