& Juliet (Play)

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      Review: On Broadway, ‘& Juliet’ (& Britney & Katy & Pink)

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      Shakespeare’s tragedy becomes a girl-power romp in a cotton candy jukebox musical, featuring songs by the Swedish hitmaker Max Martin.They don’t even bother to hide the jukebox. It’s right there, out in the open, before the show starts: a chrome Cyclops glowering at you from the stage of the Stephen Sondheim Theater, of all places.Are you daring me, “& Juliet”?I have done everything a critic can do to stamp out the jukebox musical. I’ve called it a cockroach, a straitjacket, a leech, a dead fish. I’ve argued that, with few exceptions, it’s a form that’s satisfactory neither as music nor as theater, let alone the combination. I’ve stood proudly, even among my colleagues, as a denier of everything that shows like “& Juliet” typically stand for.So shoot me: I liked it. It felt so wrong; it felt so right.This even though “& Juliet,” which opened Thursday on Broadway after establishing itself as a hit in London, trails the faint odor of carpetbagging and brand extension that makes other examples of the genre — “Motown: The Musical,” “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” and the inexcusable “Escape to Margaritaville” — so dispiriting. The show’s entire reason for being, after all, is to exploit the back catalog of Max Martin, the Swedish hitmaker behind Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” and 24 other No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 since 1998.That the songs are good to begin with — chunky, hooky, belty, dancy — is neither here nor there; they generally are, in shows like this, or there would be no audience to pander to. Also par for the course is the way “& Juliet” wedges them into unlikely contexts, aiming for laughs that are little more than Pavlovian reactions to anticipated familiarity.What saves “& Juliet” from being a lowest-common-denominator corporate byproduct is something else, something I never expected: wit.The wit operates on many levels in the director Luke Sheppard’s super-poppy production, including hilarious hybrid Elizabethan costumes (by Paloma Young) that feature a codpiece the size of a snapping turtle, cotton-candy lighting (by Howard Hudson) and playful sets (by Soutra Gilmour) situating the story in a century somehow combining the 16th and ours.Stark Sands, left, as Shakespeare and Betsy Wolfe as Anne Hathaway in the musical. The couple’s marital issues play out alongside Juliet’s new story.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut that’s just the surface; more important are some fundamental choices about what a jukebox can and should be. For one thing, “& Juliet” is not — like “Jersey Boys” and “The Cher Show” — a biomusical, chronicling artists’ ups and downs no matter how jimmied or flat-out falsified. Martin having no taste for the spotlight, it instead opts for an original story, if you can consider a reboot of “Romeo and Juliet” original. Making that story a fable — not unlike “Head Over Heels,” the Go-Go’s romp from 2018 — smartly relieves it of the pressure of reality.But the book, by David West Read, aims higher than that. Because so many of Martin’s biggest songs featured singers like Perry, Britney Spears, Pink and Ariana Grande — Taylor Swift’s are mysteriously absent from the show — the choice to focus on a young woman made sense. Yet Juliet, as Shakespeare wrote her, comes with some baggage, including the fact that by the sixth line of the prologue she’s dead.Undoing that fate became the musical’s animating principle and spine. In Read’s telling, Juliet (Lorna Courtney in a blow-you-away performance) doesn’t die but rather wakes up confused and a little emo following Romeo’s suicide. Cue “…Baby One More Time,” which she performs, still in her funeral dress but also sporting headphones and a Walkman, in front of her lover’s sarcophagus.That’s as grim as “& Juliet” gets — not very — because, as the erasure of Romeo from its title suggests, this girl is getting a glow-up. Here the show moves into meta territory, introducing Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, as the force behind the revision. “I mean, what do I know,” Anne (Betsy Wolfe) slyly tells cocky Will (Stark Sands). “Maybe she doesn’t kill herself just because he killed himself?”When Will insists (to knowing chuckles) that he writes his plays completely by himself, Anne simply grabs the quill until he agrees to share authorship. To raise the meta ante, they also write themselves into the tale. “& Juliet” then proceeds to process the Shakespeares’s marital issues through Juliet’s new story, toggling between Anne’s feminist uplift and Will’s squirrelly, writerly (and perhaps patriarchal) need to complicate it.So when the scene shifts to Paris, where Anne provides Juliet with a new boy to enjoy, that boy — François du Bois (Philippe Arroyo) — turns out to have eyes for someone else, whom Will has contrived to throw in his path. The plot now twists its way through several typical Shakespearean tropes, including comic mismatches, reunited lovers (Paulo Szot and Melanie La Barrie) and the return of yet another character (I won’t spoil who, but you can probably guess) from the grave.Philippe Arroyo, left, as François and Justin David Sullivan as May in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe songs that illustrate these developments — “Oops! … I Did It Again” when Juliet agrees to marry François, “Blow” for a big Paris ball — are mostly apt enough, though with nearly 30 of them squeezed into the show’s 150 minutes they eventually dig an aural rut. (The sound design by Gareth Owen doesn’t help, with its arena-style reverb in a relatively small theater.) And some have the tang of reverse engineering, as when Juliet’s nonbinary best friend, May, is given Spears’s “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.”Nevertheless, May (Justin David Sullivan) is a typically clever modern gloss on Shakespeare — a playwright, as Anne points out, who is “basically synonymous with gender-bending.” And if three of the couples, liberated by Juliet’s liberation, achieve surprisingly normative happy endings, the girl herself ends the show uncommitted, still trying to “own her choices,” apparently by not making any.Most of the comedy derives from similar tensions; though “& Juliet” is jokey, and its authorship is entirely male, its feminist critique is real enough, winking alternately at Shakespeare’s assumptions and ours. At one point, Anne summarily up-ages Juliet by about a decade because she’s “not going clubbing with a 13-year-old” — nor (it goes unsaid) letting a 13-year-old marry.Indeed, it’s Anne who provides most of the wit, not just verbal but philosophical. And it’s Wolfe’s performance — capped with a roof-raising rendition of the Celine Dion hit “That’s the Way It Is” — that gives the show its heart, an organ too often unheard from in musicals entirely focused on the ear.I could have used a bit more brain, though; “& Juliet” sometimes seems suspicious of its own intelligence, like a nerd invited to the cool kids’ party, only to get drunk and vomit in the pool.The overcompensation — two confetti explosions? — is unnecessary. Jukebox musicals may still be bottom feeders, but, as “& Juliet” proves, there are sometimes small treasures to be found in the murk. And as long as they’re going to keep arriving regardless, I have to admit (citing Martin’s hit for those theater critics the Backstreet Boys) I want it that way.& JulietAt the Stephen Sondheim Theater, Manhattan; andjulietbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      7 New Musicals Are Headed to Broadway This Fall

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      Behind every new New York season are a lot of wannabes, also-rans and hopeless cases to keep track of.I have friends who keep a spreadsheet of every show they’ve seen, cross-indexed to their Playbill collection.I’m the opposite. I toss my Playbills but keep Excel fired up with compulsive catalogs of what’s coming next.Especially for musicals, it’s a highly unreliable list. Some shows have sat on it undisturbed since the 20th century. I don’t think the stage adaptation of “My Man Godfrey,” first announced in 1985 and occasionally re-announced ever since, will ever actually open on Broadway. And was ABBA really going to write a version of “Marty”? No, that must have been a typo — though I’m not sure for what.On the other hand, at least one show I thought would never make it off the list unfortunately did. (Clue: It involved an escape to Margaritaville.) In my “comments” column for dubious entries, I sometimes include useful information like “Whut?”In any case, it’s around this time of year that I traditionally cull and update the herd, getting excited or terrified about what’s headed my way. So far, seven Broadway musicals are in the “definite” column, having been officially announced for the fall.They make an unusual grouping. To begin with, only one, “1776,” is a revival — and that one might as well be new. As reshaped by Diane Paulus and Jeffrey L. Page in the post-“Hamilton” manner, and featuring a cast of women, nonbinary and transgender performers, the American Independence pageant aims to offer a more inclusive history than our real past did.Also unusual: Among the six new musicals, only “A Beautiful Noise,” based on the life and songs of Neil Diamond, is a biographical jukebox. (Will Swenson, who does swagger very well, stars.) And only two others — a very modest proportion compared to most seasons — are Hollywood adaptations.One of those is “Almost Famous,” based on Cameron Crowe’s 2000 coming-of-age film about a young man swept up in a 1970s rock ’n’ roll dream. It may ensure some authenticity that Crowe has written the book for the show, and, with the composer Tom Kitt, the lyrics.The other Hollywood adaptation is “Some Like It Hot,” based on the 1959 Billy Wilder comedy. If you think you’ve seen it onstage before, you’re partly right; it was first turned into a musical, called “Sugar,” in 1972. That version’s score was by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill; this one’s by their natural inheritors, the “Hairspray” team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman.The remaining incoming musicals, though no less exciting, may be even more familiar. (I’ve already seen two of them in earlier productions.) “Kimberly Akimbo,” based on David Lindsay-Abaire’s play about a girl with a premature-aging condition, ran Off Broadway, at the Atlantic Theater Company, last season. “KPOP,” a behind-the-scenes look at the Korean pop music industry, was another Off Broadway hit, in 2017. Both will have big adjustments to make for larger theaters and audiences, and I’m eager to see how they do it.Then there’s “& Juliet,” which has been playing in London (with a pandemic interruption) since 2019, and which is the only show on my spreadsheet to start with a typographical symbol. From a distance, it appears to be a mash-up of several Broadway tropes: updated Shakespeare, romantic fantasy and hit parade. Its songs, by Max Martin, are mostly familiar from recordings by Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Backstreet Boys and the like.But the seven sure musicals this fall are only the tip of my Excel iceberg. Slightly below the water line are shows almost certain to announce their arrival quite soon, including the revival of Bob Fosse’s “Dancin’,” the stage adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada” and the London hit “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.”Diving a bit deeper, we get to a larger school of wannabes. Many seem fascinating; “Lempicka,” for one, about the hedonistic Polish painter, has been getting good reviews for its various tryout productions.Others seem stuck in development hell. “Harmony,” the Barry Manilow show about a singing group in Nazi Germany, had its world premiere in 1997; it took 25 years to get as far as the tip of Manhattan, where it had a brief run this spring. At its final performance there, Manilow’s collaborator Bruce Sussman told the audience, “I’d like to think of today as only the end of the beginning!”Everyone does, even the bottom feeders, those mystifying creatures someone apparently once considered a good idea. “Magic Mike”? “The Honeymooners”? The Baby Jessica Falls in the Well musical? The adaptation of “Paradise Lost”? (Only one of those is made up.)But for list-compulsives like me — my spreadsheet includes nearly 100 titles, from “A Little Princess” to “Zanna” — the quality of the product hardly matters. What I like to contemplate is the vast array. Sometimes I envision the titles as a swarm of planes taxiing at airports all over the country: “Bhangin’ It,” “Trading Places,” “Black Orpheus,” “Beaches,” even the “Untitled Roy Rogers Musical.” They haven’t lifted off yet, and some of them are out of fuel, but they’re on the runway, eager noses all pointed in our direction. More

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      What if Juliet Lived? A Pop Hitmaker’s ‘& Juliet’ Heads to Broadway.

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      The jukebox musical, which is already running in London, features songs by the Swedish writer and producer Max Martin, including “Since U Been Gone” and “ … Baby One More Time.”Come on, Mr. Shakespeare. Did Juliet really have to die in that tragic play of yours?A new musical that envisions a not-quite-so-star-crossed scenario for one of drama’s most famous young lovers is coming to Broadway.“& Juliet” — the title a play on “Romeo and Juliet” — features pop songs by the Swedish hitmaker Max Martin, best known for his collaborations with Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and Katy Perry.The musical began its life in Manchester, England, in 2019, and then transferred to London, where reviews were mixed but audiences enthused, and it is still going strong. A North American production is now running in Toronto, and will transfer to Broadway, where it is scheduled to start previews Oct. 28 and open Nov. 17 at the Stephen Sondheim Theater.The score consists of pop songs, many of them quite famous, including “Since U Been Gone,” “Roar,” “ … Baby One More Time,” “Larger Than Life,” “That’s the Way It Is” and “Can’t Stop the Feeling!”The show’s comedic book, featuring a variety of romantic entanglements, is by David West Read (“Schitt’s Creek”); the director is Luke Sheppard. Martin, in addition to writing the songs, leads the producing team, which also includes Tim Headington, Theresa Steele Page, Jenny Petersson (Martin’s wife), Martin Dodd and Eva Price.The cast will feature Lorna Courtney as Juliet; Stark Sands (a two-time Tony nominee, for “Journey’s End” and “Kinky Boots”) will play Shakespeare; Betsy Wolfe will play his wife, Anne Hathaway; and Paulo Szot (a Tony winner for “South Pacific”) will play a character named Lance. More

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      I Love London Theater. But Not London Theatergoing.

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      While full of fine shows, a long-awaited binge was also full of stress about how loosely audiences followed rules about staying healthy in a pandemic.LONDON — On the February morning when England’s National Health Service pinged me, saying I’d been identified as a contact of someone who had tested positive for Covid, I freaked out completely.Not out of fear of getting sick; I’m boosted, and I think if I got the virus I would probably be fine. But the last time I came to London, in September, my euphoric playgoing trip was thrown into disarray when I tested positive post-arrival, which banished me to a hotel room for 10 solitary, asymptomatic days. Was I about to get stuck here again?I’d only seen one friend this trip and he was OK, so it had to be a stranger, this person with Covid. My mind scrambled to figure out where our paths had crossed. Based on the time frame that the N.H.S. suggested, I would bet it was at a small, crowded theater two nights earlier — my prime suspect being the guy in front of me who’d sneezed mid-show. That’s when I noticed he wasn’t wearing a mask.Which made him pretty unremarkable here, in a city with genuinely world-beating theater but audience Covid safety protocols ranging from lax to cavalier, and getting looser. Over my 12-day visit, which included some gorgeous productions I am grateful to have seen, that lack of stringency dampened my anticipation of shows, my enjoyment of them — and ultimately my interest in going to them.Because even in this not-yet-over pandemic with its ever-shifting rules, I’m used to feeling safe at the theater; used to feeling like we are all looking out for one another, trying to keep everyone onstage and backstage and in the house healthy, in pursuit of this art that we love. It’s not a minor thing, this feeling; it’s rooted in empathy.And on a purely practical level? We Americans do have to test negative before we’re allowed to fly home — on planes that are still nowhere near as crowded as they used to be.TRAVELING TO SEE THEATER is one of those prepandemic habits that has yet to return for most of us, and it’s been driving me a little bit crazy.I am one of those people — maybe you are, too — who reads the news about which plays are being done in which far-flung places and aches to be in the room with them, burns with envy of those who can be, keeps checking and rechecking the mental calculus of “Can I risk it yet?” against “Can I bear one more second not to?” Evelyn Miller and James McAvoy in “Cyrano de Bergerac.” The production was wonderful, but the audience at a return performance — not so much.Marc BrennerSo when my editor, wanting a profile of the actor James McAvoy, emailed to ask if I would be willing to do the interview in London, where he is starring in Jamie Lloyd’s electrifying production of “Cyrano de Bergerac” in the West End, my answer was an all-caps, unfettered yes. It is one of my favorite cities, and I missed it. The time to risk going, it suddenly seemed, was now.I would need to see that “Cyrano” again — twist my arm — because it had been more than two years since I’d caught it in early previews during its original run. To take full advantage of the slog across the Atlantic, I would stay a while and see a slew of other shows — starting, just hours after passing through customs at Heathrow, with a matinee chosen to go easy on my jet-lagged brain.That was “& Juliet,” a pop-musical riff on “Romeo and Juliet” at the Shaftesbury Theater, where we did have to show proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test to get in, and the people near me were wearing masks. It was a jolt, though, in a more than century-old West End theater that couldn’t be described as airy, to see whole groups of people walk in and take their seats barefaced.Assembling onstage before the performance began, the actors did try, in a spirit befitting their frolic of a show, to encourage safer behavior. One briefly held up a chalkboard with a hand-lettered message: “Hello,” it said, which got cheerful hellos back from the crowd. Another brief chalkboard, another message: “Thank you,” which got some applause.But the wordless chalkboard in between those two — bearing a friendly pastel drawing of a mask — got only silence. Which, in the circumstances, counted as a response.“& Juliet” turned out not to be my cup of tea. Still, I’d have stayed if I’d been able to stop thinking about the ventilation, wondering what I was breathing and whether it was worth it.I decided it wasn’t and fled at intermission, back onto the street, back into the open air.Heather Forster and Samuel Creasey in “The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage.”Manuel Harlan“THE BOOK OF DUST: La Belle Sauvage,” that night at the Bridge Theater, was leagues more rewarding. Adapted by Bryony Lavery from Philip Pullman’s fantasy prequel to “His Dark Materials,” and staged by Nicholas Hytner with beguiling visuals, it’s the character Lyra Belacqua’s origin story.The stagecraft is more enchanting than the narrative, but what marvelous stagecraft it is: projections conjuring a watery world, life-size boats moving through it with a choreographed fluidity more persuasive than I’d ever witnessed onstage. And of course the spectral puppets, glowing from within.The lovely guy next to me, masked when he wasn’t snacking, told me he felt perfectly safe at the Bridge precisely because it was airy — not like some old West End house, he said. Until that evening, he hadn’t been to any theater since the pandemic began. (You can see “The Book of Dust,” whose Bridge run has ended, in a National Theater Live recording.)It makes me happy when I’m in London at the same time as an Emma Rice production. This trip it was her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” at the National Theater: a 19th-century classic warmed with music and breathed to life as if it had taken as its cue something Charlotte Brontë once wrote about the novel: that it “was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.”The moor is a kind of Greek chorus in the play, while the storytelling is nimble and full of fun; Katy Owen is comic perfection as Little Linton, the pampered princeling of Wuthering Heights. But when Catherine (Lucy McCormick) dies and Heathcliff (Ash Hunter) cries, “Catherine Earnshaw, haunt me!,” his jagged grief rips through us, straight to the soul.Lennie James, left, and Paapa Essiedu in the Old Vic production of Caryl Churchill’s two-hander “A Number.”Manuel HarlanIn Caryl Churchill’s brisk two-hander “A Number,” given a stellar production by Lyndsey Turner at the Old Vic, every moment of Paapa Essiedu’s beautifully modulated performance has a similar visceral reach, right into the center of us. Opposite Lennie James as a father who secretly replaced his original son with a clone, Essiedu plays three disparate but genetically identical men with an unshowy humanity that pops against Es Devlin’s stylized tomato-red set.OF EVERYTHING I SAW, though, the production that brought me there is the one that left me absolutely stunned. The first time I saw “Cyrano de Bergerac,” on Thanksgiving Day 2019, the production was still a work in progress.This time, I left the Harold Pinter Theater with a sensation through my limbs like an electrical charge. We are all bodies in space at the theater, and I responded to this “Cyrano” on a cellular level.I saw other shows, too: at the Hampstead Theater, Florian Zeller’s weary new psychological drama, “The Forest,” about a man whose seemingly perfect life is blown up by his infidelity (but at least the cast includes Gina McKee and Finbar Lynch); at the Almeida Theater, Omar Elerian’s overlong take on Ionesco’s “The Chairs,” with the reliably first-rate Kathryn Hunter in slapstick clown mode; and, at the Donmar Warehouse, “Henry V,” starring Kit Harington and featuring — this will sound strange, but it is absolutely true — the most entrancing stage rain I have ever seen. I was able to snag a ticket (a terrible one; I spent a lot of time with actors’ butts blocking my view) the day a lethal storm blew into Britain and people canceled plans.Kit Harington, center, in the Donmar Warehouse production of “Henry V.” The theater was one of the few that explicitly requested that attendees wear masks.Helen MurrayI’d canceled my own theatergoing plans earlier that week, when the N.H.S. texted me about that contact and told me to take rapid tests for five days. In my initial flood of anxiety, I nixed a train trip to Bristol and returned my ticket to see Mark Rylance there in “Dr. Semmelweis” — a play about a pioneer in the prevention of needless infection.Then, at the pharmacy, a clerk handed me a free box of seven rapid tests, from the N.H.S. — a perk of pandemic life in England that Boris Johnson, the prime minister, would announce the end of for most people days later, along with other precautions including contact tracing.Apparently I was fine. Each time I took a test, the result was negative — and each time I reported that online to the N.H.S., the automated response reminded me to “wear a face covering in crowded settings.”It boggles my mind that so many theatergoers in London, sitting side by side for hours, don’t bother with that elementary precaution — if not for themselves, then for the actors, who are not masked, and for other people in the audience who might be medically vulnerable, not able to be vaccinated yet or in close contact with people in either of those groups. It is such a simple kindness. It is also an act of inclusion.The only theater that I saw actively request it was the Donmar, and people complied. Elsewhere any such request was timid, and certainly not face to face. When major West End theater operators said recently that they would no longer require mask wearing or proof of vaccination from audience members, I had to wonder how a mask policy could count as mandatory if it had gone unenforced.One night I went to the Duke of York’s Theater to see “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” an adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novel. The show hadn’t started yet when I noticed that the guy on one side of me wasn’t wearing a mask. Then a barefaced guy sat down on my other side. I thought: If this were the subway, I would get up immediately. So I left.HOW DOES A CITY — or an industry — that wants to welcome the world and its wallet not worry about things like that? The contrast between playgoing in New York and in London isn’t about quirky cultural differences. These are fundamentally divergent ways of navigating the pandemic.One is cautious, cognizant of the frailty of bodies; of the gaps that remain in our knowledge of Covid and long Covid; of the fact that we learn of new variants only after they start spreading. The other seems heedless — telling the audience, in effect, that they can take their chances or stay home. I wonder how many people, surveying the options, have decided to keep their money and keep safe.I spent a bit more of mine, returning to the Pinter for “Cyrano.” A good single seat had opened up, and I grabbed it. I didn’t want to wait until the show got to Brooklyn to see it again. But I wish I had.The audience was, hands down, the most overwhelmingly barefaced I had seen. I kept looking at the performers, doing their jobs so gloriously on that stage, and wondering how anyone could be so reckless as to gamble with their health. That’s not a right that a ticket ought to buy you.The next night, my last in London before I flew back to New York, I didn’t go to the theater. Unthinkably, it had lost its appeal. More