[In the following review, Weber praises Emily Mann's “fresh and inviting” 2001 production of Romeo and Juliet at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey, noting the adolescent exuberance of the cast and engaging pace of the performance.]

Veronese teenagers in the time of Shakespeare may well have behaved with a different decorum from today's Americans. but that doesn't mean they weren't equally in the thrall of newly rampaging hormones. For contemporary audiences—particularly young audiences—one of the more straining aspects of Romeo and Juliet is the verbal eloquence that literature's twitchiest adolescents are able to muster even as they ache to scratch the primordial itch.

In Emily Mann's perky production of this paradigmatic romantic tragedy at the McCarter Theater here, the twain meet in Shakespearean poetry delivered by actors in distinctly modern pose. And though the show is far more effective in its first half, before Tybalt's mortal duel with Mercutio reminds us that the Montague-Capulet rivalry is gravely serious and destructive, the accomplishment of the show is in its vivid illustration that there is idiom in body language as well as in spoken language.

On a handsomely unadorned and pale-painted set by Neil Patel that resists being period-situated—its abstract design includes two balconies and manages to suggest interior and exterior walls—the performers have obviously been encouraged to prove the play's timelessness, to illustrate its reach into our age with modes of behavior we easily recognize. Before intermission at least, the collision of verbal and behavioral styles proves great fun to watch.

The imaginative actors include David Cromwell as Friar Laurence, who advises Romeo with the casually wry older-brotherliness of a well-meaning Little League coach; Myra Lucretia Taylor, who brings attitude to Juliet's nurse; Stephen Rowe as Capulet, a stern father who, like an executive away from home too much, is completely out of it where his daughter is concerned; David Greenspan as a self-aware servant, amused by his own illiteracy; Remy Auberjonois, who plays Mercutio with the crowing strut of a rebel without a cause on little sleep and too much coke; and Joe Wilson Jr., whose Tybalt has the self-importance and imposing physical stature of a football player defending school spirit.

But mostly the engaging spirit of the show is owing to the two leads, who get the excesses of junior high jumpiness just right, which is to say they overdo it to the point of entertainment and no further. Romeo and Juliet is often used to introduce Shakespeare to young readers and young theatergoers for its relevance to their own puberty-stirred lives; Juliet was not yet 14, after all. But you'd be hard pressed to find a production in which the actors play as effectively and familiarly young as they do here.

Their love-at-first-sight attraction gives them both attention-deficit disorder. Both actors are very young themselves. Jeffrey Carison, a handsome Prince Valiant type who affects a loose-limbed and distracted physicality that makes him irresistibly moony, is 24. Sarah Drew, a slender, long-haired woman with a demure mien who shows us a young girl's surprising fierceness by suddenly snapping into athletic freak-out mode whenever Romeo is on Juliet's radar, is a student at the University of Virginia; she recently turned 20.

Their chemistry together manages both the innocence and the heat of igniting first passion. And they are, both individually and together, quite funny. Under Ms. Mann's direction the balcony scene is deliciously, refreshingly antic, a giggle-inducing charmer.

The trade-off here is that with the lighthearted tone so well established, the play's abrupt shift toward tragedy makes the gears of the production grind audibly. The inevitability of the tragedy has to tickle the audience ominously from the beginning, which is why Shakespeare opens the play by dramatizing the feud between the families in a slow build of hostilities between individual characters until a brawl erupts.

One of Ms. Mann's substantial text cuts is made here, however; she gets right to the melee and then, resolving it quickly, to the lovers. The result is a quickening of the pace, an audience-inviting leap into the heart of the matter, but it hurts the production later by not establishing the deadly seriousness of the rivalry between the clans. The show never becomes as grim, in the end, as it is jaunty in the beginning, so even in the deaths of the hero and heroine the production never takes on the genuinely awful sadness that the waste of young lives should evoke.

There are some rumblings that the show, which runs here through Sunday, may move to Broadway; and it would be good to have it in New York, especially at a smaller Broadway house where the actors would not have to fill the cavernous, dialogue-swallowing space of the McCarter and where Romeo and Juliet, a family drama after all, would benefit from a more direct and intimate connection with an audience.

It's also true that at this moment, with theaters going dark and city spirits wobbling, celebrating liveliness and youth is a fine thing to do. This fresh and inviting Romeo and Juliet does that very well.