SOURCE: Morley, Sheridan. “Romeo Reaches Rock Bottom.” New Statesman 131, no. 4614 (18 November 2002): 46.

In the following excerpt, Morley finds little to praise in David Freeman's production of Romeo & Juliet: The Musical.

To understand what has gone so horribly wrong over here with a musical [Romeo and Juliet: The Musical] that has been running triumphantly in Paris these many months, we need to understand something about the French and musicals, which is basically that they hate them. Only in Paris has West Side Story ever flopped, not to mention their very own Les Misérables, whose authors were so depressed by their fellow countrymen's attitude to big band shows that they both settled over here.

Only a nation that has never really set any store by Leonard Bernstein or Jerome Robbins or Stephen Sondheim, not to mention Shakespeare, could have come up with this rock-pop shambles, one best summarised by Romeo...