NEW YORK — William Shakespeare still occupies his storied place in high school English classes, but the Elizabethan dude is under attack. Instead of dreaming at their desks of their Romeos, today’s teenage girls are more likely to figure out that Juliet gets merely a single night of passion with just one, self-absorbed boyfriend before she gets snuffed out forever. Raw deal for a young kid. Ergo, problematic author.
Enter “& Juliet,” a savvy if stunningly unsubtle mashup of a musical from London that aims to redress that balance for Broadway fun and profit. This nonstop party-empowerment show gets its theme of feminist revisionist British history from “Six,” its Shakespearean humor from “Something Rotten,” its nonbinary savvy from “Head Over Heels,” and its collage-like spectacle from “Moulin Rouge.”
The book by David West Read then adds a dose of tipsy British panto, puts the frothy milkshake in a hipster blender, and mixes the whole deconstructionist shebang to music made famous by the likes of Ellie Goulding, Katy Perry and Ariana Grande. The whipped cream on the top is the amply sampled song stylings of Britney Spears, herself a onetime Juliet, whom much of the target audience for this musical have adopted as an artist in need of rescue.
The thin premise for all of this playlist frolic (there is a tiny bit of new music, like one song, credited to Max Martin) is that Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway (to whom he famous bequeathed only his second-best bed), is irritated at being parked in Stratford-upon-Avon with the kids and has decided to take a more active role in her husband’s tawdry profession. And thus the bickering pair of them, played by Betsy Wolfe and Stark Sands, write an off-the-cuff revised “Romeo & Juliet” in real time, allowing Juliet (Lorna Courtney) not only to stay alive but to go clubbing in Paris with her nurse (Melanie La Barrie) and pals like May (Justin David Sullivan), who falls for François (Philippe Arroyo). Paulo Szot’s Lance is there to add to the fancy adults in the rooms.
Just before intermission, though, the beaten-up Bard authorially reasserts himself and Romeo (Ben Jackson Walker, who aptly appears halfway down the cast list) shows up to reclaim the marquee space before the ampersand.
Boy-band style. It is not exactly a spoiler to say he does not prevail.
That’s probably enough for you to determine if this is for you or not. A cynic might say that “& Juliet” earnestly, and repeatedly, hits so many current progressive buttons that they all lose their individual impact. A more generous interpretation would be that Juliet has laid in her tomb for plenty long, boring the pants off generations, so why not resurrect the girl and give her a feminist dance party with the happy consequence of a long line for drinks at intermission?
Either way, the play has two engaging, charming, vocal powerhouses in Courtney and Walker and, notably, it cleverly shifts the jukebox aesthetic into a much younger demographic, picking high-intensity music carefully targeted mostly to women and LGTBQ+ folks in their teens, 20s and 30s. (No Neil Diamond. Think Pink.)
The show, which has a collage-like setting with, believe or not an actual jukebox at the center, is proudly nonspecific about its period, cheerfully unconcerned with complex thinking, determined to amp up the punters in the seats and very much in sync with the personal empowerment vibe of the moment. The spiffy costumes from Paloma Young are very much in the “Six” vibe. Wolfe and Sands do their best with only a very modestly witty book. At no point does this wholly self-confident show challenge its own paradoxes, as in the simultaneous trashing of the tragedy while using it to sell tickets.
Instead, it hits the sliders on the sound board, put grins on the faces of a very hardworking ensemble dancing the heck out of Jennifer Weber’s choreography, roars out “Roar,” “Stronger” and “It’s Gonna Be Me,” stuffs Romeo into the tightest of boy-toy pants, borrows the ending from “Mamma Mia!,” and most everyone seemed to be drinking, glowing and having a predictably good time.
———
(“& Juliet” plays on Broadway at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, 124 W. 43rd St., New York; andjulietbroadway.com.)
———
