This time, he does double duty as director and fight director, and expect to see lavish swordplay, at one point with a Tybalt (Mike Rossmy) who brandishes a weapon in each hand as the characters swoop through Steve TenEyck's simple but evocative set.
There's other history in this production. Lord and Lady Capulet are veteran actors and a real-life married couple, Greg Wood and Susan Riley Stevens. Both also were involved in the festival's inaugural-season production, Stevens as Juliet. They shine here, 19 seasons later, as parents of the rebellious Juliet.
It's easy to appreciate one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, whether for the first or the umpteenth time, when a production sets the bar so high. Boyish, floppy-haired David Kenner and sweet, curly-blond Betsy Mugavero may be blessed with some of the Bard's most come-hither lines, but in their characterizations these are more than slick Elizabethan entreaties to love.
Kenner and Mugavero develop their fatal attraction so naturally - and with such vulnerability - that you immediately see them as any two kids today whose respective parents love them deeply but, right or wrong, hate their choices. (There's a lot of that going on, as always.)
They're also attractive as all get-out, together and apart. If you're my age, which is supposed to be older and wiser than their age, Kenner and Mugavero make you vividly recall what that first real fall for someone is about.
The rest of the cast plumbs the many characters who fill Shakespeare's venerable tale - "a play we can't stop doing and you can't stop coming to see," the festival's artistic director, Patrick Mulcahy, told the audience in an opening-night curtain speech Friday.
Paul Kiernan delivers a finely drawn Friar Laurence, perhaps the play's toughest role because he must be a sympathetic character but also a schemer whose allegiances are skewed. Jo Twiss is Juliet's nurse - a character often played as the story's single cartoon, but not by Twiss, whose nurse has her feet firmly on the ground even when her head soars far above them.
The kinetic pair of Jeff Barry as Benvolio and Justin Adams as Mercutio, as well as Ezra Barnes as the Prince, and Ron Heneghan and Julia Stroup as Romeo's parents - all of them give us an unruly Verona with two lessons: one about the power of love, another about the power of hate.
Romeo and Juliet
Through Aug. 8 at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival at DeSales University, 2755 Station Ave., Center Valley, Pa. Tickets: $25-$50. Information: 610-282-9455 or www.pashakespeare.org.
Contact staff writer Howard Shapiro at 215-854-5727 or hshapiro@phillynews.com.
