Being together is always nice: In the Schauspielhaus, Romeo and Juliet are reminiscent of Barbie and Ken

How do you cook a tasty ramen soup? With meat or vegetarian? The question may be banal. After all, it is what Romeo and Juliet are concerned with. Their chatty conversation about food and cooking encourages the exchange of desire and passion. In this way, the lovers secure a moment of peaceful togetherness in the midst of a world that is smoking and burning with bloody conflict.

In the original version of "Romeo and Juliet," William Shakespeare shows how the city of Verona suffers under two feuding clans. The Capulets and the Montagues are not separated by ideologies or religious differences. Their mutual hatred is more of a habit. But the love between Romeo Montague (Maximilian Reichert) and Juliet Capulet (Kathrin Angerer) makes both families feel betrayed.

Bonn Park has reworked Shakespeare's drama for the Zurich Schauspielhaus. The German director is now showing "Romeo & Juliet" as an "Italian disco opera", which premiered on Saturday on the Pfauenbühne. This could be fun, one thought when looking at this special poster. And some of it turned out to be ridiculous.

However, the situation in Bonn Park is much worse than in Shakespeare. Before the curtain goes up, a choir announces bad news: humanity as a whole is in a bad mood, and we should give up hope. And immediately afterwards, the news is illustrated on stage by a kind of street battle. There is fighting, Molotov cocktails are flying. And you can see burning houses - more precisely: the Capulets' two-story wooden house on the left and the Montagues' two-story wooden house on the right (great set design by Jana Wassong).

Romeo and Juliet appear on the opposite balconies for a first duet in which they confess their "amore". The singing is mostly in Italian - in the Alemannic dialect that German tourists have coined in Bella Italia. The couple is accompanied by synthetic organ and harpsichord chords and powerful drum beats, which are generated by three musicians in the pit in front of the stage.

But the lovers are soon drowned out by the chorus of their relatives, who are blaming each other for the recent attacks. "You are so evil, it's not okay!" The lapidary words are emphasized by all the machine guns hanging in their houses. But before the shooting and fighting actually begin, there are elections. Signor Capulet (Michael Neuenschwander) is challenging Signora Montague (Anita Sophia Somogyi) for the presidency. Both promote themselves with similar warnings and promises: their victory will lead to a bright future, while their defeat will seal the downfall of humanity.

Time for an interim assessment: Bonn Park is bringing Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" to the stage in a musical parody that refers to the present. You could do that, you would think. And yet topicality is proving to be more and more of a pitfall. As is the music. And Shakespeare.

When a production reacts to the present, the audience certainly feels addressed; the play may help them to rethink their own circumstances. In the case of Bonn Park's Shakespeare adaptation, however, the updated plot seems stale compared to the complex reality. It is certainly funny when the political antagonists face each other in a TV duel, as Robert, Alice, Friedrich and Olaf did just now. The headlines that the two clans spread in their own newspapers are also funny. And yet it is precisely through the reminder of the current conflict that it becomes clear how well-behaved and simple the political humor in this production is.

The idea of ​​an Italo-disco opera promises a lot of momentum. But it fails because the composer Ben Roessler has misjudged the genre. The fact that you don't hear any Italo-disco the whole evening - there is a lack of elastic, funky rhythms and the typical, lush sound mixture - is irrelevant in itself. What is more serious is that the songs are as unconvincing as their interpretation.

Roessler was obviously inspired by Italian hits from the 1970s, which he tried to parody. Anyone who parodies should be able to keep up with the parodied - this also applies to pop stars. But Roessler gets lost in a shallow Italian monotony. His parodies lack conciseness, charm and kitsch. The negative impression is also reinforced by the mostly weak voices of the protagonists. Perhaps the composer and director wanted to go to a meta-level in order to metaphorically refer to decadence with karaoke and amateurism. They may have succeeded in doing this - but at the expense of theatrical and musical pleasure.

Finally, Shakespeare. The problem is not that the great dramatist should not be parodied and updated. His texts are not sacrosanct. Rather, they are often so dramatically convoluted that on the one hand, cuts are advisable; on the other, this strains the narrative logic. This is also evident in the new Zurich production. At the beginning, the play sets its own priorities, but in the end it has to work to Shakespeare's guidelines. Anyone who does not know the original will hardly understand, for example, what the role of Padre Amme is all about (though played convincingly by Gottfried Breitfuss) - it is simply an intertwining of two characters. And one must wonder even more why Padre Amme poisons Julia in the end, why she is resurrected, only to kill herself again straight away.

Theater is a multifaceted and complex matter. This has the advantage that you can still find much that is pleasing even in a problematic performance. Here, for example, the costume designer (Laura Kirst) shines with picturesque suits in old pink (Montague) and orange-brown (Capulets); one is amazed by the massive flared trousers, bulging collars, risky platform pumps and virtuosically piled-up hairstyles.

But the highlight of the evening is provided by Kathrin Angerer, alias Julia. In the babbling, banal dialogues with Romeo, which are reminiscent of the ironic love affair between Ken and Barbie in Greta Gerwig's film comedy, she grows out of the framework of the narrative. Calm and bored, the precocious doll seems like the symbolic figure of a generation that already knows a lot and wants very little.