& Juliet at the Peace Center
Since the first caveman stood in front of a fire and told a story, there was someone who looked around at those gathered and asked, “Sure, but how do we get the young people interested?” This is still a key question for theater creators worldwide and the creative team behind & Juliet has come up with the answer. The show is a raucous and fun jukebox musical that, although exuberant, is a viable answer to the above question as answered by committee.
What are the ingredients we can put in this youth-baiting soup? How about a slew of iconic songs from the late ’90s and early 2000s by Max Martin? The tunes are all identifiable from their opening instrumentation and were originally performed by such bands and artists as Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Ke$ha, and Katy Perry, among others. Much of the opening night Peace Center audience’s joy seemed to be that recognition of exactly what song the writers had shoehorned where.
Ingredient #2: What if we took a play that every high school freshman is required to study and changed it to a story of female empowerment and gender acceptance? The super-thin plot could have been mapped out by ChatGPT with the prompt “Romeo & Juliet, but for Millennials.” That plot has William Shakespeare himself (Corey Mach) and his wife, Anne Hathaway (a talented Teal Wicks), reworking the dour ending of his famous tragedy at Anne’s insistence to make it happier and give Juliet more agency than just killing herself because her boyfriend died.
At the start of this retconned action, Juliet (admirably played by Rachel Simone Webb) wakes at the sepulcher where the original play ends. An assessment of her situation quickly has her trying to erase the childish mistakes of her recent past by grabbing her friends May (a phenomenal Nick Drake) and April (this is Anne Hathaway inserting herself into the proceedings), as well as Juliet’s nurse (an able Kathryn Allison), and all heading off to Paris.
Once there, Juliet’s journey, and the play itself, start to become predictable. Juliet finds herself at another ball, falling for another boy, Francois deBois/Frankie deBoy (enthusiastically played by Mateus Leite Cardoso), and discovering herself to be in some of the same positions she had just gotten out of. From lights up we are well aware that Juliet will become empowered, make better choices, and live her “happily ever after.” With several subplots to complicate these matters (including a predictable “return from the dead”), we are spoon-fed emotional beats that the work’s target audience knows to find virtuous.
The book by David West Read throws in some anachronisms and Shakespeare jokes that seek to be clever, but are easily recognized retreads of parodies that have come before. The set design by Soutra Gilmour, the costuming by Paloma Young, and the lovely three-dimensional projections by Andrzej Goulding are all exciting and striking, but even these elements seem merely like pleas from the producers for certain demographics to nod their heads in acceptance of what’s being presented to them.
If & Juliet is to be embraced as a musical unto itself, it is only through the high-spirited and exciting energy that much of the talent brings to each of the songs. A special shoutout has to go to the diverse ensemble who never second-guess the tackiness of the music or its accompanying choreography (some of it seemingly directly lifted from the latest TikTok trend).
There has been plenty of Broadway fare to demonstrate that there’s room for youths to join the theater-going crowd, but the originality of those works is what will make them endure. & Juliet will last only as long as the current longing for nostalgia.
& Juliet runs through Oct. 20 at the Peace Center. For details and tickets, visit peacecenter.org.
(Photo by Matthew Murphy)
