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What if Juliet just…moved on?
What if, in William Shakespeare’s tragedy, Juliet doesn’t kill herself but instead wakes up from her poison slumber, realizes that she’s got her whole life ahead of her, leaves Romeo behind, and achieves self-actualization? That’s the clever conceit of & Juliet, the jukebox musical on the Keller Auditorium stage through Aug. 10. And the show is a very, very good time. Long on big Broadway spectacle and pop hits spanning the late ’90s through about 2013, it’s summertime escapism at its best. Two and a half hours flew by, the only challenge was to follow theater etiquette and not sing or dance along. I’m sorry, but if someone asks “Am I original?” in the tone of the 1997 hit “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back),” the only proper human response is to say “Yeah!” in A flat.
The audience first meets its heroine Juliet Capulet (Rachel Webb) in Act I, slouching at center stage, wearing oversized headphones and awash in teen angst. Juliet’s first song is “...Baby One More Time,” a radiant and effortless performance by Webb that immediately assures the audience that it is in more than capable hands.
The villain, sort of, is William Shakespeare (Corey Mach) himself, who has been off in London writing plays, leaving his wife Anne (Nicole Lamb) to raise their two daughters in the country alone. Anne takes the quill from her egomaniacal husband, determined to write his new play, Romeo and Juliet, herself. Anne’s plot of female liberation runs parallel to Juliet’s.
“Dear, the ending is shit,” she says. “What if you change it?”
& Juliet, which debuted in England in 2019, races through 30 pop smashes during the course of the show, with heavy reliance on Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. It’s the present mapping onto the past, pop music mapping onto the plot. This idea will be familiar, of course, to anyone who has seen Moulin Rouge! The Musical or Cruel Intentions: The ’90s Musical on Portland stages, or even the Michael Jackson songbook MJ: The Musical’s swing through the Keller in July. The start of each musical number elicited a chuckle from the audience as it quickly recognized the song and then realized how the lyrics would fit into the story. When it lines up exactly, it’s bliss. The best examples: the queer love story of Juliet’s friend May (Nick Drake) set to “Whataya Want From Me” by Adam Lambert and Juliet’s empowerment anthem via Katy Perry’s “Roar.”
& Juliet is fun and silly and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Romeo (Josh Jordan) enters the show at the end of the first act by flying down from the ceiling on a swing to the tune of a Bon Jovi song, then delivers lines like: “All I’ve ever been is a sexy young man with a tight body and a lot of feelings.” The production does go a little deeper with the storylines of Anne, Shakespeare’s wife, who is a frustrated writer herself, living in her husband’s shadow and grieving a miscarriage, and May, who is nonbinary and seeking love and acceptance. These more serious beats mostly work; two and a half hours would have been a long time to skate along at surface level.
The audience at the Aug. 5 performance got another unexpected serious moment when the cast was whisked backstage in the middle of Act I as the crew paused the production for an undisclosed technical difficulty. Luckily, the interruption lasted only a few minutes and the rest of the show went off without a detectable hitch. The spectacle included pyrotechnics, two confetti explosions, a moon that Romeo and Juliet hang from, a few handfuls of glitter, and very impressive bubbles with vapor inside. Keller Auditorium was straight-up trashed after the show.
The audience was finally, finally, invited to stand up and sing and dance during the final song, but it was the worst song of the whole night! Justin Timberlake’s insipid children’s song “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” from the 2016 Trolls movie. But if the worst critique I can think of for the show was that I couldn’t fully express the songs and dances in my heart, I think & Juliet did pretty well for herself.
SEE IT: & Juliet at Keller Auditorium, 222 SW Clay St., 800-915-4698, portland5.com. 7:30 pm Friday, 2 and 7:30 pm Saturday, 1 and 6:30 pm Sunday, through Aug. 10. $74-$178.
