By GUILHERME MELETTI YAZBEK
Upon entering the New Hazlett Theater for Resonance Works’ production of Roméo et Juliette, one is struck by how little there is to see. Four simple platforms covered in a black-and-white diamond pattern occupy the thrust stage, while the chamber orchestra sits fully visible behind them. There are no painted streets of Verona, no grand Capulet ballroom, no elaborate balcony. Yet the diamond motif—echoing the harlequin-like mask worn by Roméo during the first-act ball—establishes a visual vocabulary that proves more thoughtful than the set’s apparent simplicity initially suggests. This is a production that places its faith less in scenic illusion than in proximity: between singers and audience, musicians and actors, sound and body.
That proximity becomes both the production’s greatest asset and its most persistent limitation. Resonance Works embraces the intimacy of chamber opera by placing the audience within feet of the performers and keeping the orchestra fully visible throughout the evening. Rather than disappearing into a pit, the musicians remain a constant presence, occupying the same visual field as the singers and occasionally drawing attention away from the dramatic action itself. During orchestral interludes and scene transitions, the focus naturally shifts toward the chamber ensemble and conductor Maria Sensi Sellner, whose expressive physicality becomes a performance in its own right. There is a fascinating tradeoff at work: audiences gain the rare opportunity to observe a conductor from the front rather than the back, yet simultaneously lose access to much of the orchestra’s own visual expressiveness. Positioned facing away from the audience, the musicians become more audible than visible, their presence registered primarily through sound rather than gesture. Given the ensemble’s central role in the production—and the welcome visibility of a chamber orchestra composed largely of women—one occasionally wishes for greater visual access to the players themselves.
Such exchanges define much of the evening. The chamber format sacrifices the architectural grandeur traditionally associated with opera, but offers something equally compelling in return: an unusually tactile relationship to sound. Voices arrive not as distant theatrical effects but as physical phenomena. One can see the effort required to sustain a phrase, the mechanics of breath transformed into music, even the faint trembling at the edges of a singer’s mouth while holding a note. The voice becomes not merely audible but visible. At its best, the production transforms opera into a profoundly haptic experience. Yet every gain carries a corresponding loss. The audience comes closer to the performers, but farther from theatrical illusion; closer to the material reality of performance, but farther from the visual splendor and expansive world-building that works like Roméo et Juliette often invite. Resonance Works understands this tradeoff and largely embraces it, building an evening defined not by spectacle but by immediacy.
Not all of the production’s limitations, however, stem from the constraints of chamber opera. Some arise from directorial choices that feel less fully developed. Justin Lucero’s staging often relies on functional blocking rather than a sustained theatrical concept, allowing performers to move efficiently through the narrative without consistently discovering new ways to animate the space. This becomes particularly noticeable in the many soliloquies and reflective passages staged at the edge of the thrust platforms. While such positioning brings singers physically closer to portions of the audience, it frequently leaves spectators seated on the lateral banks looking at a performer’s back for extended stretches. Curiously, in these moments, attention often drifts away from the dramatic action and returns instead to the orchestra behind it, particularly among spectators seated along the sides of the thrust stage.
The production’s relationship to audience immersion proves similarly inconsistent. Although performers occasionally enter through the aisles or emerge from unexpected corners of the theater, these moments remain too sporadic to alter the spectator’s role fundamentally. What emerges is not an immersive experience so much as an intimate one. That distinction is not inherently problematic. More frustratingly, the production occasionally hints at richer possibilities without fully developing them. The same inconsistency that characterizes its gestures toward audience immersion also shapes the staging itself. Early in the evening, one character is shown preparing for a scene in full view of the audience, transforming a simple costume change into a compelling theatrical event that briefly foregrounds the act of performance itself. Elsewhere, performers seem on the verge of stepping outside their characters, sharing fleeting glances or reactions that acknowledge the audience’s familiarity with this famously retold story. These moments suggest an intriguing meta-theatrical framework—one in which a group of artists gathers to tell a tale everyone already knows. Yet neither device is developed beyond its initial appearance. Rather than accumulating into a coherent staging language, they remain isolated gestures, offering glimpses of a more adventurous production that never fully materializes.
If Lucero’s staging only intermittently discovers theatrical richness, Gounod’s score offers a more consistent source of engagement. The composer’s adaptation famously narrows Shakespeare’s sprawling tragedy to the emotional trajectory of its central lovers, reducing the prominence of secondary characters and repeatedly returning to Roméo (Benjamin Werley) and Juliette (Helen Zhibing Huang) through a series of intimate encounters and celebrated duets. Both performers navigate these scenes with admirable musical assurance, allowing Gounod’s lyricism to remain at the center of the evening. In Resonance Works’ chamber production, this focus proves particularly well-suited to the scale of the event. As scenic information remains minimal and locations are often established more through surtitles than theatrical transformation, the music assumes an even greater narrative responsibility. The result is an evening in which audiences are invited less to inhabit Verona than to follow the emotional contours traced by Gounod’s score.
One notable exception arrives during the tragedy’s most famous scene. Rather than constructing a scenic balcony, the production cleverly appropriates an existing architectural feature of the New Hazlett itself. The solution is obvious, even disarmingly so, yet it succeeds precisely because it embraces the production’s limitations rather than attempting to disguise them. For a brief moment, theatrical scarcity becomes theatrical invention. The audience is asked to participate actively in the fiction, supplying through imagination what the production does not provide through scenery. The result is unexpectedly charming, playful, and self-aware—one of the few instances in which the staging’s economy of means becomes a genuine artistic strength rather than a practical necessity.
The evening reaches its emotional high point in the final tomb scene. Following Barbier and Carré’s notable departure from Shakespeare, Juliette awakens before Roméo dies, allowing the lovers one final duet before tragedy fully unfolds. Here, the chamber format reveals its greatest strength. Seated only feet away from the performers, audiences witness not only the emotional stakes of the scene but also the physical labor required to sustain them. When Juliette sings of “supreme joy” moments before taking her own life, the contradiction feels strangely moving—less tragic than sublime. For perhaps the first time all evening, the production’s intimacy and its material conditions align perfectly with the emotional demands of the story.
If the production ultimately falls short of the immersive experience it promises, it nevertheless succeeds in offering something perhaps more valuable: intimacy. We may never fully inhabit Verona, but we encounter the singers, musicians, and the labor of performance with unusual immediacy. In the process, Resonance Works reminds us that opera’s power does not always reside in spectacle. Sometimes, it resides in the simple act of sharing breath, sound, and space. In an operatic landscape often defined by tradition, Resonance Works continues to ask what might be gained when scale gives way to proximity. One leaves curious to see where that spirit of experimentation leads next.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Resonance Works production of Roméo et Juliette at the New Hazlett Theater has one remaining performance on June 21, 2026 at 3 pm. Tickets at: https://ci.ovationtix.com/36406/production/1266608?performanceId=11770445
Guilherme is a Brazilian theater and dance critic, practitioner, and scholar whose practice moves between criticism, performance studies, and contemporary artistic practices. He is a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. www.guilhermeyazbek.com
Categories: Arts and Ideas, Reviews
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