Romeo and Juliet: Katherine Cornell as Juliet and Edith Evans as the Nurse. 1934. Grebanier considered this production one of th

"Although they had toured with this play, Cornell and her husband Guthrie McClintic decided to open Romeo and Juliet in New York with a completely new production. Guthrie threw out the entire production and started over, with just a handful of the actors from the tour. Orson Welles was kept, but played Tybalt instead of Mercutio, making his Broadway debut. Maurice Evans played Romeo, while Ralph Richardson took the part of Mercutio, and Edith Evans played the Nurse. Guthrie's idea was to keep the play 'light, gay, hot sun, spacious' with no hint of the doom that would conclude the play. Also, he coached Cornell to read for meaning, sense and emotion, in place of the poetics of iambic pentameter. This was a great break with past productions, which up until then had relied upon Victorian prudery and notions of how a classic play should be performed. Guthrie reinstated the Prologue and believed that all twenty-three scenes were necessary, cutting only the obsolete comedy of the musicians and servants. For the first time. the carnal desires, the youthful romanticism, and the earthiness of language were given equal importance."

The production opened in December, 1934, and, as usual, the reviews were glowing. Burns Mantle called Cornell "the greatest Juliet of her time." Taking note of the freshness of approach, Richard Lockridge of the New York Sun wrote that Cornell played Juliet as "an eager child, rushing toward love with arms stretched out." Cornell herself said that her biggest secret of acting is to do away with all excesses and embellishments, to bring an interpretation to its utmost simplicity. Margot Stevenson from the original cast later said that Cornell was "just this big Italian girl in love!" Stark Young said in The New Republic: She makes you believe in love, that Juliet loves, and that the diapason and poetry of love are the reward for its torment. Of various [other] Juliets this must have been one of the last things to be said."

John Mason Brown wrote in the New York Post: "It is not often in our lifetime that we are privileged to enjoy the pleasant sensation of feeling that the present and the future have met for a few triumphant hours....Yet it was this very sensation—this uncommon sensation of having the present and future meet; eye-witnessing the kind of event to which we will be looking back with pride in the years to come—that forced its warming way, I suspect, into the consciousness of many of us last night as we sat spellbound. Miss Cornell's Juliet is luscious and charming. It finds her at her mellowest and most glamorous. It burns with the intensity Miss Cornell brings to all her acting. It moves gracefully and lightly; it is endlessly haunting in its pictorial qualities; and reveals a Miss Cornell who equals the beauty of the lyric lines she speaks with a new-found lyric beauty of her own voice.... To add that it is by all odds the most lovely and enchanting Juliet our present-day theatre has seen is only to toss it the kind of superlative it honestly deserves." (Source: Wikipedia item on Katharine Cornell, Section 7.1, under GNU Free Documentation License. The whole account of this actress is strongly recommended). Bernard Grebanier considered this production one of the best ever of the play. Photo: courtesy of the Hampden-Booth Library, New York.