‘& Juliet:’ There’s a Will, but no way
'& Juliet' runs through Sunday at the Belk Theater
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on October 23, 2024. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. And check out this link for Toppman’s archive of reviews in the Ledger.
Review: Cheerfully brainless ‘& Juliet’ fails to live up to its own self-empowerment message
by Lawrence Toppman
I have enjoyed recent Broadway tours of “Six,” which asks us to rethink preconceptions about feminine behavior in 16th-century England; “Moulin Rouge,” set among conflicted lovers in 19th-century Paris; and “Girl from the North Country,” which embedded a famous composer-lyricist’s songbook in a narrative that gave new meaning to those pieces. I expect next month to enjoy “Some Like It Hot,” a musical where gender fluidity reshapes a classic narrative. (I saw the New York production.)
So why does “& Juliet,” which combines these four elements, fall so mindlessly flat? Because it throws those concepts and countless others into a half-cooked stew. It’s shoddily constructed, irritatingly preachy, and endlessly repetitive with its pummeling message of self-empowerment. It can’t even live up to the courage of its own convictions: Juliet, liberated to discover herself when she chooses not to commit suicide after Romeo’s death, accomplishes exactly this: She gets the right to decide who’ll be her next boyfriend.
Guess what? She has already empowered herself farther than that in Shakespeare’s play. She refuses the suitor her parents proposed, gets married in secret to Romeo, deceives her family by taking a sleeping potion and pretending to die, and lies in the Capulet tomb awaiting her husband’s return and their elopement from Verona. She shows backbone, self-awareness and intelligence, which she achieves only partly after two and a half hours in “& Juliet.”
The real point of the cheerfully brainless musical at Belk Theater is to assemble more than two dozen songs by Swedish producer-writer Max Martin and his collaborators, getting the crowd to “throw your hands up in the air/And wave them around like you just don’t care.” Audience members who did so didn’t mind that author David West Read created an irrelevant subplot about a 19th-century boy band just to shoehorn “(Everybody) Backstreet’s Back” into the tale.
The story begins in late 16th-century England, where Shakespeare announces he’s finished a new tragedy, “Romeo and Juliet.” His wife, Anne Hathaway, informs him the ending stinks, and he’d do better to collaborate with her. They then co-write a new version, in which Juliet runs away from Verona circa 1400 to Paris circa 1890. (You know it’s Paris because the set contains a tiny Eiffel tower and the windmill from the real Moulin Rouge.)
She travels with her outspoken nurse, a gender-fluid best friend named May, and a female best friend named April, who’s actually Anne Hathaway; Anne and Will show up in the new play as actors yet also address the fictional characters as authors. Juliet meets timid Freddie, who could be her new beau if he’s not more attracted to May. Meanwhile, we learn Freddie’s father once had a romance — time-travelling, apparently — with the nurse.
The show carefully ticks off politically correct boxes. No straight white men, including the greatest playwright of all time, can have profound understanding of human emotions until set right by women and/or people of color or gender-fluid folks. Luckily, the clueless Caucasians immediately see the error of their ways, including Freddie’s dictatorial dad. Five minutes after Freddie abandons Juliet at the altar, Dad’s grabbing lovebugs Freddie and May for a group hug.
Marriage doesn’t count for much — Juliet’s willing to get hitched while married to the resurrected Romeo — because the mantra “I gotta be me” matters more than anything. This message is really just self-assertion: Except for Anne Hathaway, none of the women in the play wants to empower herself further than the next romance.
The excellent cast speaks the inane words as if they were Shakespeare and sings with tremendous verve. They need to, as virtually every song — however quietly it may begin — turns into an all-out anthem hurled heavenward at top volume. I wanted to wave my hands around in the air like I just didn’t care, but they were frequently over my ears.
If You’re Going: “& Juliet” runs at Belk Theater, 130 N. Tryon St., at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, and 1:30 and 7 p.m. Sunday.
Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews about two times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.
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