Review: & JULIET at ASU Gammage

Guest contributor David Appleford gives a thumbs-up review of & Juliet, on stage at ASU Gammage in Tempe, AZ through November 9th.

In the Tony-nominated musical & Juliet, it’s as if William Shakespeare was handed a bedazzled microphone and told to start writing Romeo and Juliet all over again, only this time he should make it a fizzy, whirling pop fantasia that pulses with enough pop/rock earworms to play in your head on an endless loop for days.

Now playing at ASU Gammage in Tempe until November 9, there’s a moment when our Shakespeare’s normally tragic heroine belts Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time. It’s absurd. It’s audacious. It’s ridiculous. Yet the shock isn’t that it happens, it’s that it somehow fits. And like a tight pop hook that should be irritating but instead becomes addictive, this jukebox musical about rewriting a famous tragedy of teenage lovers spins its farcical premise into a giddy rebuke of all things grim and orthodox.

The premise is an act of feminist revisionism: What if Juliet did not die next to her swoony dead boyfriend? What if, upon waking up groggy but intact, she took one look at Romeo’s lifeless pout and decided, no thanks, there’s still some partying to be done?

It’s a story-within-a-story setup, with Shakespeare himself (CJ Eldred) beaming with self-satisfaction while pitching his regular tragic classic to a crowd, only to be interrupted by his wife Anne Hathaway, played with sly exasperation by Crystal Kellog. She’s had enough of all this poison and stabbing. Why not do a rewrite? And why not throw in I Want It That Way by Backstreet Boys for musical support?

You’d think a Shakespearean jukebox musical would crash and burn under the weight of its own kitsch. But instead, & Juliet tosses its hair and, like Katy Perry, roars. Quite literally. The songs (more than 30 of them!) are culled from the hit-factory pen of a man called Max Martin who, if the name means nothing, is the efficient one-man pop hit factory from Sweden; he’s basically the Ikea of Billboard’s chart-topping songwriting.

Book writer David West Read takes the cultural absurdity of reframing Romeo and Juliet through pop music, drawing from Martin’s full glittering arsenal, including songs first performed by Jessie J, Katy Perry, The Weekend, Kelly Clarkson, and Bon Jovi among others.  These are songs that know exactly what they are and never pretend otherwise. It’s as though Shakespeare’s teenage leading lady stormed out of the Globe by the River Thames and delivered her liberation on Britain’s Got Talent while wearing sneakers.

What follows is a glitterbomb of teen liberation with an ensemble so exuberantly queer and gloriously diverse the whole affair feels like a rejection of everything Broadway used to be afraid of.  Juliet might be widowed, but she’s still young. Time to grab her best friend, May (Nico Ochoa), and her delightfully salty nurse Angelique (Kathryn Allison), and thumb a coach ride across Europe to Paris for some post-traumatic party-going. There, they can club-hop, kiss strangers, and belt out Britney’s Oops! I Did It Again.

Jennifer Weber’s high-energy choreography is all hip flicks and jazz hands and falls somewhere between High School Musical and a cruise-ship spectacle. It’s enthusiastic, if not exactly revolutionary. But & Juliet isn’t trying to change the world, or musical theater for that matter. It just wants to keep it dancing for two and a half hours straight. And that it does.

On opening night in Tempe, understudy Lois Ellise stepped in as Juliet and went gloriously full-throttle, like a five-foot plus spark plug with the kind of voice that could cut glass, tearing through showstoppers like Katy Perry’s Roar and Kelly Clarkson’s Stronger. Joseph Torres as Romeo gives us a guileless prince who’s more adorable than tragic. Crystal Kellog’s Anne Hathaway, yearning for something more than a life of shadow-writing behind her famous husband, brings a blazing comic edge that actually flirts with depth.

Director Luke Sheppard keeps the engine running with both a Broadway polish and a YouTube attention span. The show barrels forward, barely pausing for breath, and if it leans a little too hard on confetti and costume reveals, well, that's part of the charm. No one should go to & Juliet at Gammage expecting subtlety.  Luckily, Paloma Young’s costumes do the heavy lifting: corsets meet combat boots, doublets flirt with joggers, and the effect is pure pop-theater fusion.

However, you may find the visuals are more serviceable than spectacular: Soutra Gilmour’s scenic design offers a tourist’s dream of Paris. There’s an Eiffel Tower here, Metro sign there, and a Moulin Rouge windmill for good measure. But the different European designs are more screensavers than scene-stealers.

When it comes down to it, & Juliet isn’t trying to be profound, it’s trying to be fun. And with that it succeeds wildly. It’s somewhere between a rush of teen pop and the campy wink of a drag show; a jukebox musical that knows the world is on fire but hands you a disco ball all the same. If the pink signage and pulsing LED set pieces of lighting designer Howard Hudson, who lets no color go unblasted, didn’t tip you off, this is not your father’s Shakespeare.

Is it relentlessly eager to entertain? Without a doubt. At times, the razzle threatens to drown out the dazzle. Is it perfect? Don’t even go there. But it knows exactly what it is: a boisterous mashup of teenage autonomy dressed up in doublets and sounding like Destiny’s Child.

It may not leave you with a better grasp of the Barb’s verse, and don’t worry, there’s no need to brush up your Shakespeare, but it just might leave you humming your way out into the parking lot. Your ears might be ringing, but you’ll be smiling just like Juliet after she’s dumped the boyfriend, plugged in the auxiliary cord, and turned the volume up to eleven. The Bard may have penned the original, but Max Martin just dropped the mic.

ASU Gammage -- https://www.asugammage.com/ -- 1200 S. Forest Avenue, Tempe, AZ -- 480-965-3434

Photo credit to Matthew Murphy

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Best Musical - Top 3

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23.3% of votes

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