& Juliet and Titanique: two newly minted cult classics

Fears that the new pop-parody musical & Juliet would be a vehicle for steamrolling Shakespeare are understandable but unfounded. It’s true that, on Broadway as in the rest of the arts, holding dead white males up for flagellation is now almost a cherished ritual — a recent example being last season’s Six, a glitzy feminist paean danced on the grave of Henry VIII. There’s a healthy dose of girl power in & Juliet, too, and I don’t doubt that a few heedless theatergoers came with tomatoes in hand, hoping to find the Bard pilloried.

Let me tell you a secret: the theater world still adores Shakespeare, even in 2023. To renounce him is to swear off your mother’s milk. Funnily enough, this explains why Shakespeare-bashing does have some purchase in the academy, where deracination passes for something other than lazy scholarship. But for anyone — from top-billers to bit players, playwrights to stagehands — who has actually had to make a living with Shakespeare, rather than against him, his worth is self-evident.

This appreciation is evident from the opening number, the Backstreet Boys’ “Larger Than Life,” led by William Shakespeare himself (Stark Sands) and backed by his adoring troupe. The curtain is set to rise on his new Romeo & Juliet, until Will’s wife Anne Hathaway (Betsy Wolfe), down from Stratford for the premiere, challenges him to write a less tragic ending — a beginning, really — in which Juliet chooses not to kill herself. “Are you a strong enough man,” she teases, “to write a stronger woman?”

The charge is specious: the suicides are famously equal: the lovers kill themselves because each thinks the other is dead. William nevertheless consents, persuaded by Anne and his players over the course of “I Want It That Way.”

But as Juliet’s new story unfolds, we realize that writer David West Read (Schitt’s Creek) doesn’t mean for us to take Anne’s criticism as gospel. Anne reveals herself as something of a ditz, with dramatic tastes tuned to the Hallmark channel, and her frustrations have more to do with William’s real-world absence than any onstage shortcomings. Instead, as William and Anne grapple for control over the new story, they come to embody the show’s fundamental tension: between Shakespearean tragedy and the glamorous ethics of pop music, epitomized by Max Martin.

Max Martin? Laugh if you want, but as the writer of twenty-five — count ’em, twenty-five — Billboard Top 100 number-one hits (behind only McCartney and Lennon), the Swedish songwriter/producer is the closest thing we have to a “bard” today. It’s all his music on the bill, and it’s no surprise that the likes of Britney Spears, Pink!, and Katy Perry translate well to the Broadway stage.

What really makes & Juliet shine, though, is how deftly the music is handled by Read and music supervisor Bill Sherman. In some cases it’s a matter of careful plotting, as with “Oops!… I Did It Again,” in which William, Juliet (Lorna Courtney) and her maid Angélique (Melanie La Barrie) all lament their respective romantic blunders. In others, the hilarity comes from the unexpected context — as in “Teenage Dream,” now a duet between the frumpy Angélique and her former employer and lover, Lance (the stentorian Paulo Szot as the burly cavalier is not to be missed).

Alas, for many theatergoers, even discerning ones, to “handle deftly” the music of Spears, Perry et al. would entail throwng it in the trash bin. Nor would I think of persuading them otherwise. Still, for those who wish something less than the fires of Gehenna upon Max Martin & Friends, or can grudgingly admit to having belted “Since U Been Gone” in the shower, well, & Juliet may surprise you, as it did this reviewer.

On the topic of pop-musical hijinks, I’d like to put in a brief word for another production, Titanique, a raucous parody of the James Cameron film built around the music of Céline Dion. Céline (Marla Mindelle, spot on) was there when the ship sank — did you forget about “My Heart Will Go On”? — and wants to tell us how it really went down. Though the ambition is narrower, the interest more parochial (“because let’s face it,” as Céline shouts near the end, “most of you tonight here are gay”), this newly minted cult classic is as funny and original as any musical I’ve seen in recent years, on Broadway or off.

Like & Juliet, it’s not for everyone. But if you’ve longed to hear Ruth (Russell Daniels) call Rose (Carrie St. Louis) a “walking yeast infection”; if you thought the ship’s frozen obstacle would be better cast as the “Iceberg Bitch” Tina Turner (Avionce Hoyles); or if representing the 1912 Renault Type CB Coupé de Ville from that scene with a plastic Fisher-Price model, among other outrageous props, sits right with you — then buy the ticket and take the ride.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2023 World edition.