A 'ROMEO' BY ANY OTHER NAME.

Byline: Evan Henerson Theater Writer

Theater Writer Just stop me if you've heard this story more than 30 times before.

Son and daughter of feuding families meet and fall in love. The kids try to make a go of it despite family wranglings. Things don't work out. People die. Mourning families acknowledge their stupidity. Curtain.

Choose your feud, historical or contemporary, real or imagined: Protestant vs. Catholic, Jews vs. Palestinians, Puerto Ricans vs. Anglos. Vals vs. West Siders. Somebody, in some medium, has grafted it onto William Shakespeare's ``Romeo and Juliet.''

Call it the play's double-edged sword. It's almost too familiar. Even if you've never seen it, you think you have.

``For years, I avoided the play. I didn't particularly like it,'' says Michael Arndt, artistic director of the Kingsmen Shakespeare Company in Thousand Oaks, which will restage its summer production of ``Romeo and Juliet'' for a three-week engagement ending Feb. 18. ``It's a little like watching 'Titanic': You know where it's going when it begins.''

Veteran actor and Shakespeare instructor Dakin Matthews admits that ``Romeo and Juliet'' has never been among his favorites of Shakespeare's tragedies, although after working on three productions of the play - including a 1983 version in Berkeley featuring a then-unknown Annette Bening as Juliet - the play is starting to grow on him.

``Shakespeare was just discovering his tragic style,'' says Matthews, who plays Capulet in a new production directed by Sir Peter Hall opening tonight at the Ahmanson Theatre. ``The love material is stunning and gorgeous, and the play is so far above what anybody was writing at the time.''

Which is, of course, why artists in all arenas keep coming back to ``Romeo and Juliet.'' It's the love story, arguably the greatest of all time. Who among us can't relate to forbidden romance and parental rebellion?

``We all like being around people in love. We're all romantics at heart,'' says Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. ``We also get terrified by the strange fatalities of chance.''

Hall's production places the ``extremely white,'' stiff-collared Juliet (played by newcomer Lynn Collins) and her Capulets living in a multiracial ghetto. Romeo (DB Woodside) and most of the Montagues are African-American. The time period is a little hazy, but the combatants still fight with swords.

``I thought it would be an interesting take for Los Angeles,'' says Hall, who last directed the play 40 years ago for the RSC. ``You can say I've cast a multiracial group of people, who are bubbling with talent, to express elements of the play that have not been expressed in the past.''

Hall's version figures to be radically different from the Kingsmen production, which sets the play in 19th-century Ireland. Or, for that matter, it's an even greater contrast to Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film with Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo and John Leguizamo's Tybalt going at each other with pistols.

Same plot. Same language. Radically different looks.

``The more successful productions create a reality people can really identify with,'' says actor/director Michael Arabian, who directed a site-specific production of ``Romeo and Juliet'' seven years ago on the CBS lot in Studio City. ``I wanted to be exactly what's happening in our lives today. I thought of the anti-Semitic problem in our culture. He's a Jew. Her family are anti-Semites.''

In Arabian's production, audience members followed the action on foot from scene to scene, steering clear of characters on cars and motorcycles, and becoming actual bystanders at the Capulet ball or at a street brawl.

For the second half, audiences got to sit down as the company performed on a sound stage of what was then the ``Seinfeld'' set. Romeo, played by Arabian, committed suicide by injecting himself with poison to the blaring strains of U2's melancholy ``With or Without You.''

Making ``Romeo and Juliet'' accessible is practically an international pastime. Luhrmann moved the story to present-day Florida, added a pounding rock soundtrack, cast DiCaprio, registered the domain name www.romeoandjuliet.com and hit the jackpot. Purists might argue the movie wasn't exactly Shakespeare. Maybe, but who cares, countered a flock of junior high school English teachers whose students suddenly had a reference point and - thanks to DiCaprio and co-star Claire Danes - an interest in the story.

Besides, after nearly 30 years of comparisons to the 1968 film directed by Franco Zeffirelli, pop culturists were more than pleased to have a new touchstone.

``(Our) film made Shakespeare real and accessible to a generation that would not have otherwise bothered,'' said Miriam Margolyes, who played the nurse in Luhrmann's film. ``A lot of that was due to the huge charisma of Leonardo and Claire. That's star power working.''

Margolyes, who will play the nurse again in Hall's production, said Ahmanson audiences will get an entirely new perspective on the story.

``Every generation finds something that speaks to it in Shakespeare,'' she said. ``Of course, (in the Hall production) we found the prejudice.''

``The play has never gone out of the repertory,'' agrees USC instructor Howard Schmitt. ``I think it's more a matter of every generation having its take.''

Schmitt and Dr. Sharon Carnicke are co-instructors of an interdisciplinary performing arts class devoted entirely to ``Romeo and Juliet.'' After studying five films, four operas, a ballet, a musical and a parody, even the staunchest fans of the ``star-crossed lovers'' might want to take a wrecking ball to the next balcony they encounter.

Still, the course has unlimited potential for growth and change, as the instructors check out new versions or adaptations of the play wherever and whenever possible. Schmitt traveled to Minneapolis to see ``Romeo & Juliet: The Musical,'' a rock opera that sets Shakespeare's words to music by Terrence Mann and Jerome Korman. His assessment: ``Juliet needs a love theme.''

Elements of ``Romeo and Juliet'' can also be found embedded in other stories, Schmitt points out.

``It's surprising how the play has kind of inveigled its way into the cultural reference,'' says Schmitt who is also the costume designer on the Kingsmen production. ``In another show, when somebody is doing a high school play, they go to 'Romeo and Juliet' for the play within the play.''

Screenwriters Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard went to town with the fictionalized ``creation'' of ``Romeo and Juliet'' (originally titled ``Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter'') in the Oscar-winning film ``Shakespeare in Love.'' Shakespeare, played by Joseph Fiennes, is suffering from writer's block until he falls in love with Gwyneth Paltrow's cross-dressing heroine Viola de Lesseps. Viola, an actor in Shakespeare's company, ends up playing first Romeo and then Juliet in the play's first production.

For his pop opera ``bare,'' which plays through Feb. 11 at the Hudson Theatre in Hollywood, composer Damon Intrabartolo had the students at St. Cecilia's boarding school stage a production of ``Romeo and Juliet'' as a parallel to ``bare's'' love story. In Intrabartolo's version, the high school seniors playing Romeo and his friend Mercutio are the star-crossed lovers while Juliet and her trusty nurse despise each other.

Like Mann and Korman, Intrabartolo set much of Shakespeare's verse to music. It wasn't hard, the composer said.

``Musically speaking, Shakespeare is the best lyricist you can ever work with,'' he says. ``He's dead, so he can't argue, and the verse lends itself so well to melody and structure.''

Intrabartolo calls ``Romeo and Juliet'' the ``Sizzler's buffet'' of Shakespearean drama, saying it has something for everyone, young or old, straight or gay.

``I think it's the most beautiful and best-told love story ever,'' says Intrabartolo. You can be 90 and looking back and remembering or you can be 17 and fighting those feelings of desire vs. reality.''

``ROMEO AND JULIET''

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday; through March 18.

Tickets: $25 to $55. Call [phone].

``ROMEO AND JULIET''

Where: Kingsmen Shakespeare Company at the Janet and Ray Scherr Forum Theatre, Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza.

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday; through Feb. 18.

Tickets: $23.50 to $29.50. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo:

(1 -- 2 -- color) DB Woodside and Lynn Collins, below, star in the Ahmanson Theatre production of ``Romeo and Juliet.'' Michael Arabian and Marie Chambers, left, fronted a 1993 version produced at CBS Studio Center in Studio City.

(3 -- 4 -- color) Jannah Ferguson and Stephen Lorenzo Reyes, below, play the star-crossed lovers in the Kingsmen Shakespeare Company production, of Romeo and Juliet.'' The roles were played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, right, in the 1996 Baz Luhrmann movie.

David Crane/Staff Photographer