‘& Juliet’ is a Joyful, Pop-Powered Sensation
The glorious pipes of Rachel Simone Webb supply the wind beneath the wings of "& Juliet's" extensive national tour.
Boasting more number-one hits on the Billboard Hot 100 than any other music producer in history, Swedish songsmith Max Martin stands pretty much alone in the modern pop game. Among songwriters, only Paul McCartney has penned more number ones than the man who brought us “…Baby One More Time,” “I Kissed a Girl,” “Since U Been Gone,” and countless other era-defining smashes.
But is there a Max Martin song for every beat of a heartfelt feminist revision of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet that sees young Miss Capulet choose life instead of the dagger?
The team behind the 2023 Broadway musical sensation & Juliet sure thinks so. The Tony-nominated jukebox jam, directed by Luke Sheppard, works three decades of Martin’s biggest hits by a dozen artists — from Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys to Adam Lambert, P!nk, and the Weeknd — into an exuberant Girl Power musical comedy with a book by Emmy-winning Schitt’s Creek writer-producer David West Read.
It’s already made believers out of legions of fans. Now, & Juliet, still packing them in on Broadway, is coming for the rest of North America with a touring production just launched at the Kennedy Center. Staged with verve and style, the show makes the most of Martin’s catalog of co-written tunes, although not every song choice fits like a glove on Read’s witty retelling of the Bard.
William “Will” Shakespeare himself appears as a character, portrayed by Corey Mach, eager to present his timeless love story. But he’s interrupted by his unsung, oft-forgotten wife Anne Hathaway (Teal Wicks), eager to reclaim her voice as a storyteller. Anne interjects the idea of a Juliet who lives, determined to find a happier ending than the tragedy her husband conceived for her.
Opening their respective cases with dueling Backstreet Boys numbers — “Larger Than Life” and “I Want It That Way” — Will and Anne establish themselves as a power couple caught in a battle of the sexes. Mach and Wicks brew a zesty tension between husband and wife, despite neither really delivering knockout vocals in the pop style of Martin’s songs.
Wicks, whose acting surely satisfies, tends to sound either too comic in her song delivery or like a show-tune belter trying (too) hard to be a sassy rocker. Mach, meanwhile, registers as a good singer who does not convey the lite-funk oomph of Martin’s oeuvre, neither in his vocals, nor in his stabs at Jennifer Weber’s music video-inspired choreography. This power couple, though appealing, is not where the production’s power resides.
For that, we turn to Rachel Simone Webb’s fabulous Juliet, who brings it home consistently, starting with her urgent, impassioned “…Baby One More Time” and finishing with a soaring “Roar.” Graduating from understudying the role on Broadway, Webb captures the character’s youthful naiveté with the proper hints of humor, persuasively takes us along on Juliet’s journey of self-discovery, and the vocals are jaw-droppingly great.
She wears both Shakespeare and Martin well — not to mention Paloma Young’s Elizabethan-meets-MTV costumes. And she has excellent support in Kathryn Allison as Juliet’s nurse, Angélique, and Paul-Jordan Jansen as Angélique’s love interest, Lance. Jansen plies these pop tunes with an incongruously classical brio that’s insistently funny and fits the story, which, eventually, does make room for Romeo (Michael Canu).
Not only is Juliet’s dearly departed granted a grand entrance, set to Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life,” but he inspires what is perhaps the show’s best use of a Martin hit, as Juliet blasts him with Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.”
Juliet’s moving on, alright, with the help of Anne, Angélique, and her non-binary buddy May (Nick Drake), who gets what is perhaps the show’s most forced use of a Martin tune, singing Britney’s “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.”
Though sung well by Drake, the song is both too on the nose, and yet also off-target, for the queer “I want” number. May sings that they’re “just trying to find the woman in me,” raising questions that the characterization doesn’t really address.
“May is who May is, and it’s none of our business,” we’re told, and that message resonates even when the songs, like “I Kissed a Girl,” don’t exactly. Also resonant is the romance between May and François (Mateus Leite Cardoso), another character Shakespeare didn’t write, who represents a facet of young queer love that Shakespeare likely would have understood, if not outright embraced.
Might he also have embraced a musicalization of his biggest hit as a vehicle for the so-called Shakespeare of Pop? We can only imagine he’d appreciate the similar strains of youthful folly and star-crossed love prevalent in Martin’s songs, and declare “I want it that way” rather than “Oops…I did it again.”
& Juliet (★★★☆☆) plays through Jan. 5, 2025, at the Kennedy Center Opera House. Tickets are $45 to $239. Call 202-467-4600, or visit www.kennedy-center.org.
The national tour also plays Atlanta (1/7-12), Houston (1/21-26), Nashville (2/11-16), Providence (2/25—3/2), Philadelphia (3/25-4/6), Cincinnati (4/8-20), Louisville (4/22-27), Minneapolis (5/13-18), Denver (6/4-15), Las Vegas (6/24-29), San Francisco (7/1-27), Seattle (7/29-8/3), Los Angeles (8/13-9/7), and many other cities across North America through 2026. For tickets and info, visit www.andjulietbroadway.com and click U.S. Tour Tickets at the top of the home page.
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