The jukebox musical “& Juliet” boasts 30 songs (including reprises) written by Max Martin and friends popularized by Ariana Grande, Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and others. If you know and love those songs—and, on opening night last week, it was clear that the huge audience at San Francisco’s Orpheum Theatre did—then you are likely to be in musical heaven.
If not—if the thrill of the relentless pounding beats starts to wane around the middle of the second act—the wit of the book by David West Read (a writer and producer on “Schitt’s Creek”) and the cast’s singing, acting and dancing talent provide more than enough compensation.
Based on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” in which the star-crossed teenage lovers end up dead (Romeo by mistake, heartbroken Juliet on purpose), this is a delightfully feminist, gay-positive, upbeat version of the tragedy.
In it, William Shakespeare’s feisty and contrarian wife, Anne Hathaway (Teal Wicks, a dynamo)—to whom he famously willed his “second-best bed,” much to this Anne’s annoyance—insists audiences won’t want to see a play about dead teenagers. “Are you man enough to write a stronger woman?” she demands, and takes over the assignment herself, foregrounding Juliet. Marital bickering ensues.
Her cowed husband (a low-key, likable Corey Mach) finds himself struggling with his firecracker wife, who not only invents a more female-positive, happy-ending plot, including a gay subplot and an older-couple subplot, but wends her way into the cast of the play-within-a-play.
Anne’s rewrite begins with Romeo, Juliet’s lover for a full four days, already dead (turns out he was cheating on her anyway), and Juliet (Rachel Simone Webb) about to be sent by her parents to a nunnery.
Donning backpacks, Juliet, her nurse (Kathryn Allison) and her two best friends, April and May, leave Verona for devil-may-care Paris. “Keep it light, keep it fun, and then we’re done,” advises Anne briskly. William protests that his “Romeo and Juliet” is meant to be a tragedy. His next one will be about a happy marriage, he promises. Working title: “Macbeth.”
“& Juliet” is a huge, across-the-board audience-pleaser, and this touring production, directed by Luke Sheppard, works beautifully, from the set, which includes a changing panoply of wall projections along with swift changes of décor and furniture, to joyous choreography, an all-around excellent cast and clever details (Juliet’s bedroom wall sports a unicorn tapestry; a brightly painted merry-go-round horse pulls an elegant carriage).
Juliet’s devoted nurse runs into an old lover, Lance (Paul-Jordan Jansen, a commanding presence with a powerful bass); Lance’s timid son (Mateus Leite Cardoso) comes out of the closet; and altogether the mix and match of various couples is an inspired subversion of some of Shakespeare’s own comedies (I’m looking at you, “Kate of Kate Hall.”) In this rewrite of his popular tragedy, the characters ultimately claim their own destiny.
Finally, even if the songs may feel like overkill, every lyric in this popular jukebox musical seems to actually fit, and propel, the story.
“& Juliet” continues through July 27 at the Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market St., San Francisco. Tickets are $58-$260 at broadwaysf.com.
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