Romeo And Juliet

Lantern Theater Company's Romeo and Juliet begins before it begins: fights on the street, stealthy comings and goings, women are grabbed, rich, highborn men are drunk and belligerent. Everyone is armed to the teeth - swords and knives - and then somebody says "peace. " Yeah, right. What a place Verona is: Feuds, duels, and havoc will, as they say, ensue. The young star-crossed lovers will, through their suicides, teach their parents the need for reconciliation. This old, sad story is about two teenagers from warring families who have a moment of joy only to have things go terribly wrong through an agony of mistiming, mistakes, parental commands, and just plain bad luck.

Letters to Juliet , a quasi-romantic comedy about old love and new love, is notable for the earthy beauty of Amanda Seyfried, the ethereal loveliness of Vanessa Redgrave, and the postcard charm of Verona, Italy. It's also a case of art imitates life imitates art. If that makes it a tribute to a tribute to a classic, then it is no less enjoyable for that. First, the backstory: Since the release of the 1936 film of Romeo and Juliet, missives from real-life lovelorn have flooded the Verona mailbox of Shakespeare's fictional Juliet.

People in Center City are thrusting blades and filling the air with clanks and zings. They spring into the air as others slash with swords where they were standing just a moment earlier. Some spar while racing about, or hurl stray weapons and send them spinning into other fighters' hands. Some come at others with daggers. Several die, it appears. Then they get up. It's a coincidence, but this month of March features more swordplay on Center City professional stages than usual - three substantial productions that cannot be effectively staged without old-fashioned dueling violence.

Does art imitate life, or life imitate art? You couldn't tell this weekend at the Academy of Music, during the final Pennsylvania Ballet performances of Prokofiev's masterpiece "Romeo and Juliet. " After everyone took their bows after Saturday afternoon's performance, the curtain rose again on principal dancers Julie Diana and Zachary Hench. Hench, on bended knee, offered an engagement ring to the astonished Diana. No one seems to have known about Hench's plans except Diana's parents, here visiting from San Francisco.

Major life changes, even happy ones, create enormous stress. So it's no wonder that, by the third act of the Pennsylvania Ballet's current production of John Cranko's Romeo and Juliet, playing through Sunday at the Academy of Music, Juliet Capulet is a wreck. In barely three days, the luminous 14-year-old (danced with great charm and seriousness by Leslie Carothers Saturday evening) has met her intended husband, jilted him by falling hard for the equally lovestruck scion of an enemy clan, married the outlaw in secret, and then, on their clandestine wedding night, discovered that he has killed her mother's favorite nephew.

"Moonlighting's" Allyce Beasley is taking to the L.A. stage in an innovative new production of "Romeo and Juliet. " Beasley, who started rehearsals this week, reports she was able to take on the L.A. Ensemble Theater project because the protracted writers' strike has delayed production of "Moonlighting. " "It'll take four to six weeks to gear up the series even after the strike's over, so I'm pretty sure I'll at least be able to open the play on Sept. 1," she says. "Then I'm hoping to do the play on weekends around my 'Moonlighting' schedule - if my energy holds out. " NBC News has announced it will launch its 30-second newscasts on the hour, to be called "NBC News at This Hour" on Monday, Aug. 1. The newsbreaks run from 10 a.m. through 3 p.m. on weekdays.

"I don't like conceptual shows," playwright Joe Calarco says of his high-concept, all-male adaptation Shakespeare's R&J. Mauckingbird Theatre's production of Calarco's script is the Philadelphia premiere of a play that had long, successful runs in New York and London (not to mention Japan and Australia). Currently in previews, it opens Wednesday at the Adrienne. Mauckingbird, which is dedicated to re-viewing classic drama through a gay lens, debuted in January with an all-male production of The Misanthrope, a surprisingly persuasive, as well as entertaining, take on the classic Moliere comedy.

When Romeo (we're talking the real Romeo - balcony, Verona, love-lamed and all) says his spirit "lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts," does he really need to leap as he says the words lifts me? And what about Juliet's dad? Sure, he's exasperated because his daughter refuses to accept the marriage he's arranged to the noble but passionless Paris - wouldn't you be, if you'd gone to all that trouble? She'd better be in church for the nuptials, he commands, as Juliet sobs at his feet, or "I will drag thee on a hurdle thither.

For about half its length, the Romeo and Juliet that director Russell Treyz has laid on the stage of the Labuda Center for the Performing Arts works uncommonly well. In the remaining half, however, Treyz is done in by the unevenness of his cast and, perhaps, his own reluctance to push his ideas as far as they're prepared to go. You don't have to read his program note for the production, the second of two in the inaugural season of the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, to recognize that Treyz sees Romeo as a kind of cautionary tale for the young.

Marshall Flaum, 85, an award-winning producer, director, and writer who specialized in documentaries, died Oct. 1 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of complications after hip surgery, his family said. Mr. Flaum won five Emmy Awards, had several more nominations, and was twice nominated for an Academy Award, for the documentaries The Yanks Are Coming (1963) and Let My People Go: The Story of Israel (1965). Mr. Flaum wrote, directed, and produced both documentaries.