“Y de estas dos casas rivales, Dos amantes con suertes fatales.”

Theatre’s most classic tale, with a latin twist.

The Madeline Park Shakespeare Festival ushered in their fourth season with the evergreen Romeo & Juliet, and I had the opportunity to costume design for their run this past September. The show ran for two weekends at Madeline Park to hundreds of patrons, young and old, with a modified bilingual (English & Spanish) script.

Concept

In order to best serve the El Paso community, Madeline Park Shakespeare festival specializes in creating bilingual scripts with latin themes. For their version of Romeo & Juliet, the director chose to cut all female characters except for Juliet and the Nurse, with the only female actress being Juliet. Along with that, he also chose to have a minimal color palette. The Montagues were to be all black, the Capulets in Red, Juliet in white, and the Prince in Blue. Set in a timeless space, on a land that currently does not exists.

Process and Challenges

With a cast of 10 people, more than half of the actors had to play more than one character. This usually poses the problem of creating visually distinct looks that can support the actors choices, but in my situation I also had to make all the changes possible without a dressing room available backstage. Because of this, all the actors had a “base” look that could be added to, accessories in the specific color palette mentioned before to show where the character’s loyalty lies. There also had to be variety in how they were styled, to also help aid in character distinction. The full concept design is available here.

Another element also changed from the original play was the masquerade where Romeo and Juliet meet, now set as Juliet’s Quinceñera instead. This meant that Juliet also had to have a look and dress in the style of a Mexican Quinceñera that needed to be easy to get into and dance in. The look was able to be achieved via layers of long petticoats overtop the dress and tiara added atop her head. The men still wore masks, and danced bachata with handheld fans. All in all, quite a non-traditional rendition of Romeo & Juliet.