& Juliet – Shaftesbury Theatre

Cassidy Janson, Miriam-Teak Lee and Melanie La Barrie in & Juliet at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London. Picture: Johan Persson

& Juliet is booking at the Shaftesbury Theatre until May 2020.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Jukebox musicals tend to get a bad rap. And to be fair, many such constructions deserve their poor reputations: plundering an artist’s back catalogue in order to appeal to fans, often with a wafer-thin book that sometimes does little more than run through a sanitised biography.

The number of jukebox shows that actually work can be counted on one hand. Singin’ in the Rain was conceived as a vehicle for MGM’s collection of songs written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown for their earlier musicals. More recently, Mamma Mia! combined the lyrical storytelling of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus with a fun book that showed how the jukebox subgenre can really work if administered with love.

To this select group of successful shows can be added & Juliet, a bonkers new show revolving around modern pop hits written, or co-written, by Swedish producer Max Martin.

Martin’s track record includes 75 Billboard top 10 hits, including 22 No. 1s, from the late 1990s onwards. The longevity and breadth of his output – from crowd-pleasing anthems to bubblegum pop, from hymns of self-empowerment to ballads about love and loss – provides enough content to populate a full-length musical, with lyrics to match every mood and plot point.

What nobody could have expected is just how gloriously bonkers the resultant musical could be. & Juliet imagines a Shakespearean world that is doublet-and-denim modern, the influences of Hamilton and Six in adding showbiz pizzazz to history coming to the fore. In this arena, Cassidy Janson’s Anne Hathaway challenges her husband Will Shakespeare (Oliver Tompsett) to rewrite Romeo and Juliet so that the heroine does not, in fact, kill herself at the end of the play, but goes on to live an independent life.

And thus the husband and wife begin crafting a new tale, with nods to the original. As Juliet discovers that the dead Romeo was in fact a serial lover, she leaves Verona and heads for a new life in Paris, accompanied by her Nurse and two friends. But as Will and Anne battle over the authorship of this new play, plot twist after insane plot twist combine to form a glorious mess of relationship dramas and potential romance.

David West Read’s book leans in to all the absurdity, crafting a tale which is as Shakespearean in its delight at finding unexpected rhymes and bad puns as it is gloriously silly in a very British panto style. It is absolutely bonkers, in a way that will doubtless not be to everyone’s taste. But as a framing device for some of the most recognisable chart tunes of the last 20 years, it’s well structured and frequently hilarious.

Martin’s lyrics work surprisingly well for the most part, rarely if ever requiring adjustment to fit the narrative setting. Perhaps the most egregious failure is the title line from ‘…Baby One More Time’, which does not particularly fit with the concept of Juliet mourning her lost Romeo (although it should be noted that the rest of the song’s lyrics are a far better match).

Beyond that, songs that explore the intensity of emotions felt by teenagers and young adults play in perfectly to a story of Juliet and her friends’ self-discovery. And if there is any incongruity at all, then the play just leans into and has fun, making it near impossible for the audience to do anything else.

That’s helped enormously by the talent on display. Janson and Tompsett, in their roles as storytellers who cannot help but inject themselves into the story, are delightful throughout – and while usually deployed as comedy foils, Janson’s confession about the loneliness of bringing up her two daughters (and dealing with the grief of the loss of her son, Hamnet) while her husband is away in London is palpably moving.

Within the story world, Miriam-Teak Lee’s Juliet is a force of nature – strong and passionate, yet simultaneously with an air of naiveté befitting her teenage heritage (the play having fun with Juliet’s “true” age of 13 in the original text). Vocally capable of being both tender and raucous, Lee is tremendously well cast here.

That wise casting continues elsewhere in the cast, especially with Arun Blair-Mangat as Juliet’s non-binary friend May. Blair-Mangat’s character may not perfectly align with the lyrics of ‘I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman’ or ‘I Kissed a Girl’, but they’re close enough, and played with so much conviction, that it refreshing to see true gender fluidity represented on a West End stage.

The comedy comes thick and fast throughout, especially from Melanie La Barrie’s Nurse and, through a miracle of metafiction, Jordan Luke Gage as a resurrected Romeo. But while there is much in the book that verges on silly, Read’s book always brings events back to a true romantic core.

There are always questions about how feminist, or how empowering, a story can be when marriage to a man is presented as the pinnacle of a woman’s achievement. & Juliet’s crowning achievement is that it presents the ability for a woman to choose for herself who, or whether, to marry as the ultimate expression of empowerment. Although it is not the final number of the evening, Lee’s powerhouse rendition of Katy Perry song ‘Roar’ is the culmination of that expression.

Director Luke Sheppard has crafted a staging which is camp, silly, romantic and not a little bit profound. It feels like the jukebox musical genre has just welcomed its latest success.

Scott Matthewman

Tickets for & Juliet are available HERE.