Francis Jue, who plays Friar Lawrence in the current production of “Romeo and Juliet” at the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park, wasn’t ordained to marry people until May, when the show’s director, Saheem Ali, asked if he would be up for it.
The director was hoping to end the opening night performance at the famed Delacorte Theater in Central Park with a real-life wedding. While researching the play, Ali had met an engaged couple and invited them to marry. That wedding quickly morphed into more, and by the time “Romeo and Juliet” closes on June 28, Jue, who was ordained by the Universal Life Church, will have officiated a wedding or vow renewal each of the show’s 33 nights.
On June 9, Paolo Valore and Dr. David Marc Witzel became couple No. 16.
Valore and Witzel’s meeting was a little more modern than that of the ill-fated couple who preceded them onstage: They met in January 2019 on the dating app Growlr.
Valore, a philosophy professor at the University of Milan, had just arrived in New York on a Fulbright fellowship with six months of research ahead of him.
“I was thinking, maybe I can be introduced to new friends,” he said, “and I won’t feel lonely.”
Witzel, an ophthalmologist based in Manhattan, had just finalized a divorce from his wife of 30 years. “It was about as un-acrimonious as a divorce can be,” Witzel said. (His ex, Patricia Lindemann, now a close friend, attended the wedding in Central Park; their two adult children served as witnesses.) Still, he wasn’t ready for anything serious when he and Valore sat down at a Starbucks in Manhattan’s theater district on Jan. 13, 2019, before Valore was due at a matinee of “King Kong.”
“The great irony is I was just like, I want to breathe, I want to relax,” Witzel said. “I don’t want anything serious.” Instead, “I nabbed him.”
Witzel, 60, grew up in Westport, Conn. He has a bachelor’s degree in history from Princeton, a master’s degree in public health from Columbia, and a medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Valore, 54, grew up in Milan and studied classics at the University of Milan before getting master’s and doctorate degrees in philosophy there. He has never been married and felt ready for a relationship.
“David was so open, so relaxed about being gay and happy about who he was,” Valore said. “It wasn’t even a month before we were in love.” But a year after that, they were separated by Covid.
Valore and Witzel had settled into a long-distance romance, flying regularly between New York and Milan, when Valore returned to Italy just before the pandemic. But from February 2020 to May 2021, when border restrictions prevented them from seeing each other in person, they made do with daily video chats.
Once they were reunited in New York, Valore moved into Witzel’s apartment on the Upper West Side.
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“The fact that we were so loyal to each other, waiting and wanting to preserve this, even during a world pandemic, was to me an important test,” Valore said.
On July 13, 2025, at a Salem, Mass., reunion of Witzel’s college friends that doubled as a 60th birthday party, Witzel unintentionally proposed. A friend had written a series of discussion prompts on scraps of paper. Witzel picked one from a passed hat that said, “What are your goals for the next stage of life?”
“I said, ‘Part of my life goal is to get married to Paolo,’” Witzel said. “Someone said, ‘Did I just hear an engagement?’”
In May, a friend invited Valore to a tech rehearsal for “Romeo and Juliet.” Before it was over, an announcement was made about the weddings. “I thought, yes, I love it,” Valore said. “We were like, OK, the universe is throwing this possibility at us,” Witzel said. Valore was due back in Milan in mid-June. They secured the June 9 slot.
Each “Romeo and Juliet” wedding has followed a script. At the end of the play, Jue, still in character as Friar Lawrence, welcomes couples to the stage and asks if they will take each other “to have and to hold for all the risings and settings of the sun,” among other vows. Valore and Witzel did so through quavering voices before an audience of 1,860.
“We’re these two middle-aged guys in tuxedos in the park, and the cheering for us was more than for Romeo and Juliet,” Witzel said. Their union had provided a hopeful postscript to the tragic end Shakespeare’s lovers meet, he said: “It was a nice catharsis for the audience.”
Even Jue was swept up in the moment. “I welled up during their ceremony,” Jue said, adding that the rest of the company had the same reaction. “Their affection for each other is so obvious.”
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