First Look: Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor Hit Broadway as Romeo + Juliet—With a Jack Antonoff Assist

It’s no accident that the latest Broadway revival of Romeo + Juliet begins previews on September 26, just a few short weeks before the US presidential election. The buzzy production, starring West Side Story breakout Rachel Zegler and Heartstopper’s Kit Connor, with an original score by Jack Antonoff and direction by Tony winner Sam Gold, aims to place William Shakespeare’s 16th-century text into the present day, complete with voter registration partnerships and a particular eye toward the play’s themes of ideological division and whether they can be overcome.

“This play is about generational trauma and the world we leave behind for our children,” Zegler told Vanity Fair from her dressing room, complete with a black-and-white photograph of theatrical patron saint Stephen Sondheim on the wall. “It is a generational feud that causes the death of five characters in this play, and that is not a small number. So I think there’s a real deep importance to understand the world we are leaving behind for the next generation. And as someone who used to be the next generation and is now the generation, I cannot emphasize enough, as an American citizen, the importance of exercising your right to vote.”

Sitting next to Zegler, Connor, a Brit, offers his solidarity with the sentiment and help with the registration drives, even though he can’t vote himself: “I’ve got to do my duty!”

The show has been hotly anticipated, and details beyond its roster of cast and creatives have been kept largely under wraps, until now. This is Romeo + Juliet as you’ve never quite seen it before, exposed bra straps and all.

No, thine eyes do not deceive you: Those are indeed stuffed animals strewn about the stage early in the show.

Until now, the best sense of the show has come from a teaser trailer featuring Zegler and Connor in suburban New Jersey, set to Antonoff’s band Bleachers’ “Tiny Moves” and released in May. They canoodle on a couch and in a bathtub full of stuffed animals (“There’s lots of teddy bears in this production,” Connor says, Zegler backing him up, wide-eyed: “He’s not even lying”), dressed in windbreakers and tank tops, the back of Zegler-as-Juliet’s bra visible over the back of her top throughout, Connor-as-Romeo kneeling on the bedspread in black boxer briefs and reaching out to caress her face. That sense of imperfect charged-up youth will be present in the show, they promise, even if the dialogue is a few hundred years old.

“We don’t change any of the language, but I think it’s also very much kind of grounded in the modern day and with the youth of today,” Connor says. “I think that this production is exploring lots of things about what it is to be a young person today and exploring things like violence and sex and societal pressures and all that fun stuff.”

It’s never specified whether the fair Verona where Gold’s production lays its scene is in Shakespeare’s Italy, or, say, Verona, New Jersey, a suburb whose name causes Zegler to perk up and chirp “I played volleyball there!” while Connor marvels, “Oh, is that actually a place?”

The theater where the Montagues, Capulets, and their associates will let their bloody love story unravel isn’t just any stage, either: The Circle in the Square isn’t just where Gold won that Tony for directing the musical Fun Home, or where he staged his recent critically lauded play An Enemy of the People, but it’s also the closest thing Broadway has to a theater in the round setup, its thrust stage meaning that there are both no bad seats for the audience, and nowhere to hide for its nervous stars. The production announced floor seats for the show, which Zegler says will be “like seeing a movie in 4DX” for those who opt for them, while Connor warns, “You’re not just on the edge of the action, you’re in it, frankly. That’s how we want it to be. We want to take these scenes that are incredibly iconic and you want to feel like you’re there.”

New Jersey native Zegler was awestruck seeing the theater transformed for the show. “As someone who’s grown up seeing shows in this theater, I’ve never seen it used in such a way, where it’s kind of become a jungle gym of sorts for the cast of and the crew of this show,” she says. “It’s a lot of like running, jumping, climbing, and I think that that’s a really cool thing to bring into it, and that’s why all of us have never been in better shape.”

And adding to that “incredibly immersive” vibe in the intimate venue, Zegler says, is Antonoff’s score. The show isn’t a musical, but they’ll both sing in it, they tease. Or, as Connor says, “She sings. I make an attempt.”

“He sings beautifully, by the way,” Zegler says. “He’s bluffing.”

Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler.Both from Getty Images.

Zegler calls Antonoff “kind of the bard of the modern generation. I feel like any kind of young person you speak to, whether it’s somebody who is more of a Bleachers fan than they are of Taylor Swift or Lana Del Rey, that man has songs with Bruce Springsteen. He kind of appeals to all of it. I feel like, whilst using the language of the 1590s, we are showing you, the audience, that it hasn’t changed. The world hasn’t changed, and the way that young people explore their feelings hasn’t changed.”

Even before previews began, the show’s run was extended by four weeks, a good sign. “It’s not a bad start,” Connor says, then adds, “We just got to make sure that it’s good.” Zegler, too, is a little fretful about potential VIP audience members and the possibility that “they don’t tell us that somebody we admire is in the audience, and then they lock eyes, because you can see everyone from the stage.” The splashy marketing campaign and starry names involved in the show seem to be working for the goal of getting younger people to the theater, maybe introducing them to Shakespeare for the first time.

“This thing that Sam likes to tell us is this idea that this group of young kids have just kind of knocked and broken their way into the Circle in the Square and put on a play because it feels like that’s what they need right now, and that’s what the world needs,” Connor says.

The “ultimate goal is to make this a palatable iambic pentameter for the youth of today to walk away with the newfound love of Shakespeare,” Zegler says, “a newfound love of live theater, and for this, what we’ve come to lovingly call a tragicomedy, because there’s still a lot of really lovely moments of humor in it.”

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