Love’s Labour’s Lust: A Romeo and Juliet Comedy Musical

Not Quite Committed Productions is the labour of love of Tessani Wells and Ella Ragless. Having just finished high school, these two young people have devoted the last six months to creating and staging a musical from the ground up. Full disclosure, Ella is a good friend of my daughter Rouane.

Tessani and Ella have basedLove’s Labour’s Lust loosely around the story of Romeo and Juliet, transferring the setting to the modern era. Romeo becomes a lovelorn fool, Juliet is the epitome of a dumb spoilt brat, and the humour is eyerolling teen sarcasm.

First things first, these young women have thrown enormous effort into this work and have come up with the basis of what could be a great musical. Right now, the production has some wonderful and genuinely funny moments and shows enormous promise.

As you would expect, this was a huge challenge to pull together in the time available and there are areas the play would benefit from further guidance from people experienced in theatre. The script could use a good tighten, although it’s aimed at a younger audience than me. I would have liked to have seen more of the body count board as a running gag and a perhaps bit less shrugging at the audience. Ella Ragless’s score is clever, with some songs drawing on classic 60s rock musical sounds reminiscent of Godspell, particularly “You’ve Got To Go”and the overture. The cast’s voices range from competent to very good and when the whole cast sings in harmony it’s great. My favourite song was when Darcy Lamb (Romeo) croons a particularly sweet love theme accompanied by ukulele.

It’s an excellent effort and Tessani and Ella should be commended for the amazing work they’ve put into pulling this together. I’d like to see it further developed after this season finishes.

Cathy Bannister