Fan Casting

New York City. Present day. Two families control the city's most powerful real estate empires — the Montagues, rooted in Brooklyn's old money and new media, and the Capulets, whose glass towers define Midtown's skyline. Their rivalry is old, brutal, and deeply personal. Street-level fistfights between their employees and associates have already drawn the attention of the NYPD. One more incident, the mayor warns, and both families lose their operating licenses. Romée Montague (20, she/her) is the youngest daughter of the Montague empire — brilliant, impulsive, haunted by a past heartbreak with a woman named Rosie that left her cold and directionless. Her cousin Benny is her best friend, her protector, and her wildest accomplice. To shake Romée out of her funk, Benny drags her, disguised, into a glamorous Capulet rooftop gala. There, Romée sees Jules Capulet (18, he/him) — understated, quietly beautiful, with a sharp wit he keeps carefully hidden from his overbearing mother. They speak. They dance. They don't know each other's names until it's already too late. What follows is five breathless days and nights across the city: secret rooftop meetings, a midnight elopement arranged by Friar Lena (a progressive community chaplain), a duel in a Bronx parking lot that ends in blood, banishment, a desperate plan, a sleeping drug, a delayed message, and a crypt beneath an old Brooklyn cathedral where everything unravels. VERONA does not try to save them. It asks why — in a city of eight million people, with every resource at their fingertips — two young people still chose the oldest, most tragic path. And it answers: because the world around them never gave them a real choice.