& Juliet builds its entire score from about 30 pop songs written or co-written by Max Martin, and its 2022 Broadway production earned nine Tony nominations including Best Musical.
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David West Read, who wrote for Schitt's Creek, built the book around a framing device rather than a plot transplant. Anne Hathaway argues with her husband about the manuscript of Romeo and Juliet, wins the point that the heroine should survive, and then writes herself into the rewrite to defend it. The show is therefore about authorship and revision as much as it is about the songs, and the two arguments run in parallel: whose story is this, and who gets to change the ending.
The score is drawn from the catalogue of Max Martin, the Swedish producer who wrote or co-wrote a remarkable share of the English-language pop hits of the last three decades. That is the real subject. Hearing '...Baby One More Time', 'I Want It That Way' and 'Since U Been Gone' in sequence, sung by different characters in different dramatic situations, exposes how consistent the underlying craft is across artists and eras — the same harmonic instincts, the same placement of the hook. One original number, 'One More Try', was written for the show.
The West End production opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in November 2019 and took three acting prizes at the 2020 Olivier Awards from nine nominations, including Best Actress in a Musical for Miriam-Teak Lee in the title role. The Broadway production opened at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in November 2022 and received nine Tony nominations at the 2023 ceremony without winning any of them.
The usual complaint about jukebox musicals is that the book bends to accommodate the songs. Here the bending is the joke: a break-up anthem is reassigned to the person doing the leaving, a declaration of devotion is sung by someone who means it sarcastically, and the lyrics keep meaning something other than what the radio taught the audience to expect. Whether that is clever or merely busy is the argument the show reliably starts on the pavement outside.
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& Juliet is a 2019 jukebox musical featuring the music of Swedish pop songwriter Max Martin, with a book by David West Read, in which Anne Hathaway negotiates with her husband, William Shakespeare, to change the ending to Romeo and Juliet so that Juliet does not kill herself. Juliet's parents plan to send her to a convent, so she flees to Paris, accompanied by her nurse, a friend and Anne herself, who writes herself into the play as a new character, "April". Shakespeare resists Anne's ideas, and the story unfolds as a tug-of-war between the two writers, with Juliet consequently buffeted between lovers and advisers, as Anne seeks a happy ending for her.
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