Young, handsome and dead

Each summer, some unanticipated trend emerges among local shows. And this year, it’s “pretty lover boys die young.” It’s happening all over town.

There’s the Sacramento Shakespeare Festival’s Romeo and Juliet—an unusual production, because the show has an all-male cast (standard practice in Shakespeare’s day), and because the cast wears Elizabethan-style garb. Pumpkin breeches are seldom seen in Shakespeare shows nowadays; most productions opt for a more contemporary look. Actor Sean Olivares, who plays Romeo, told SN&R that he gets pretty sweaty in his heavy Elizabethan costume performing outdoors on a hot evening. Romeo gets into sword fights, and he also has lots of lines between the moment he swallows poison, and the time (several minutes later) when he breathes his last breath.

Another production of Romeo and Juliet is at the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Fest—with costumes recalling 1930s Italy when the Fascists were taking control. The fiery Tybalt becomes one of Mussolini’s dreaded Blackshirts, a private army of sinister thugs who eliminate anyone blocking their leader’s path to power.

And in the Davis Shakespeare Festival’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the title character (a dapper young-man-of-means, engaged to wed) appears to meet a grim fate. Drood takes a fateful walk with a dubious companion during a howling storm (on Christmas Eve!). He’s never seen again, and is presumed to have been murdered. In Davis, Drood is played by actress Susanna Risser, who looks snappy wearing pants and a fedora.

Then there’s the upcoming Music Circus production of West Side Story (August 4 through August 9). Many people forget that in the 1957 Broadway premiere, the star-crossed lover Tony (who falls for the Puerto Rican beauty Maria) was a Polish-American boy (though “Tony” tends to suggest Italian heritage). The Music Circus is reportedly sticking with his original Polish-American lineage. Either way—spoiler alert—the lover-boy dies in the finale.