“A campy, colourful and explosive jukebox musical”
I saw this show on a gloomy mid-autumn Monday evening, but once inside the theatre you could be forgiven for thinking it was Friday night at the best concert of the year, such was the atmosphere and spectacle.
& Juliet is a mere five years old, having premiered in Manchester in 2019 and been picked up by the West End shortly thereafter. It’s currently on a UK and Ireland tour, and is showing at Liverpool’s Empire Theatre until November 2nd – if you’re feeling the cold and dark after the clocks going back, I’m not sure I could recommend a show more likely to revitalise and blow away the seasonal cobwebs.
With a book by Schitt’s Creek writer David Read West and music by the extremely prolific Max Martin, & Juliet explores what might have happened in Shakespeare’s classic Romeo and Juliet if Juliet did not die, and the end of the play was, in fact, just the beginning?
This show is an assault on the senses in the best way: a campy, colourful and explosive jukebox musical that felt at times almost panto-esque, an effect heightened by the unsolicited and seemingly involuntary audience ‘ooh’s, ‘ahhh’s and ‘yeah!’s. While it’s couched in a (relatively) more ‘serious’ storyline, the relationship between William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway (played by X Factor’s Matt Cardle and a brilliant Lara Denning), the show’s heart is in its modernity and its relentless hope: theme layered upon theme included queer love, gender fluidity, sexuality, friendship, gaining independence, and the power and importance of choice, all bolstered by arguably some of the biggest hits of the past 30 years.
The show’s music, as well as being impossible not to tap your feet to, was often presented for maximum humour: clever speech-to-song segues for ‘I Want It That Way’ and ‘Oops!…I Did It Again’ were used to great effect, and there was some excellent wordplay (befitting Shakespeare himself) during ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’.
It’s genuinely difficult to pick a particular aspect of the show to comment on: set, lighting, costume, and sound were all fantastically over the top, with saturation and intensity turned up to 100 – at one point, when two characters sat atop a crescent moon floating above the stage to sing over a nightscape of Paris, I was hard pressed to imagine even Baz Luhrmann could have devised a more extravagant display.
Of the performers, it would also seem a disservice to comment on any above the others – the vocals and dancing were flawless across the board. Without getting too waylaid, particular mention should go to Jack Danson’s hapless and dopey Romeo, Lara Denning’s Anne Hathaway for her remarkable ability to code-switch from joy to despair in the blink of an eye in both singing and in speaking, and Gerardine Sacdalan’s Juliet, simply for an incredible voice that blew the roof off.
It feels like the soul of this show is in its energy, which suffered a little at the beginning of Act 2 with perhaps too many slower ballads in quick succession, but it wasted no time in gathering momentum again, showcasing numbers such as ‘Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)’ and ‘Roar’ in ways that felt straight out of a concert arena.
This is a spectacular show which will warm you inside and out – please do go and see it if you can.