How ‘& Juliet’ Became an Against-the-Odds Hit on Broadway

Back in the fall of 2019, on the night of the first performance of “& Juliet” in Manchester, England, director Luke Sheppard was sweating.

“Nobody had bought a ticket,” he recalls. “We were in a theater that held thousands, and we sold less than 100 tickets. It was nerve-wracking.” 

It didn’t take long for the jitters to settle. Sheppard was able to exhale about 20 minutes into Act 1, as protagonist Juliet Capulet (you know her name but not this take on her Shakespearean story) hits the final note of the pop anthem “… Baby One More Time.” (How does Britney Spears relate to the Bard? We’ll explain.) “That was the first time I went, ‘Wow. This could be something extraordinary,’” he says.

“& Juliet” soon transferred to the West End but struggled to hit its stride; the London run was disrupted by COVID and closed without turning a profit. On Broadway, “& Juliet” found new life when it opened in 2022. Today, the musical is still packing in crowds, a feat for a show that isn’t a revival or a movie adaptation and lacks big stars or Tony wins. It’s the only production from its season that’s still running, and one of only four new musicals since the pandemic (including the Michael Jackson-based “MJ,” upbeat historical drama “Six” and screen-to-stage story “The Outsiders”) to recoup their investments.

“A lot of theater industry people thought ‘& Juliet’ wasn’t going to work,” Sheppard says. “But New York gave us a second chance.” 

Fittingly, that’s a theme in the joyous “& Juliet,” which has translated beyond Broadway with a profitable North American tour as well as productions in nine countries including Germany, Canada and Singapore. The story imagines what would happen if the heroine didn’t stab herself with Romeo’s dagger and join him in death. Her new lease on life is scored to chart-topping hits from Max Martin, the Swedish music producer known for his collaborations with Spears, Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande and Celine Dion.

While everyone on the planet knows Martin’s catalog, jukebox musicals (a term for shows built around existing songs) have a reputation for prioritizing flash over substance. Although producers were worried about that association, they decided to embrace it, using ABBA’s “Mamma Mia!” as a North Star. Just as that musical with Swedish roots offered a dose of optimism after 9/11, the creators of “& Juliet” consider their show a cure for COVID blues. 

“Jukebox musicals are often looked down on,” Sheppard acknowledges. “But we’re proud. Max wrote a lot of the jukebox.” 

Martin’s wife, Jenny Petersson, was the first to suggest that he pursue a musical based on his extensive music library. Martin was open to the idea, but he’s deeply private and didn’t want a show about his life or career as a pop star whisperer. Still, when the producers met with potential writers, nearly all of them had pitches about boy bands or aspiring starlets.

“Some of the stuff was absolutely wacky,” remembers producer Theresa Steele Page, who was discouraged and exhausted by the time she met with David West Read, a Canadian writer who later won an Emmy for “Schitt’s Creek.” “When I got off the phone with David,” she recalls, “I said, ‘This is the guy.’” 

Read thought of the concept for “& Juliet” while he was shuffling through a playlist of 250 of Martin’s songs. Aware that Martin wasn’t a household name despite his track record of No. 1 hits, Read was racking his brain for more recognizable monikers to plaster on the theater’s marquee. He came up with Juliet, one-half of the star-crossed lovers from “Romeo and Juliet,” after noticing that many of Martin’s songs were about young love and heartbreak. Read’s way into the story was through William Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, who are characters in “& Juliet.” In a meta-spin, the musical kicks off with the pair arguing over how to end the famous tragedy.

Read wrote the script and then added the songs to match the story. But there was one track he knew from the start that he would include. “We had to have ‘… Baby One More Time’ because it made Max’s career,” he says. He quickly found there’s a Martin banger for nearly every occasion, including relationship disagreements (“I Want It That Way”), dance floor meet-cutes (“I Kissed a Girl”), teen angst (“Whataya Want From Me”) and identity struggles as a nonbinary person “(I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman”). Not everything worked with Shakespearean times; Bops with too many contemporary references, like Perry’s “California Gurls,” were out of the mix. More to the point, Read believes “& Juliet” clicks not just because of the nostalgia of listening the world’s biggest pop songs from the late ’90s and early aughts, but because the story is “well structured with emotion.”  

“We never wanted to depend on the music,” Read says. “We had to treat this as if someone was coming to the show who had never heard of Max’s music, someone living in a cave.” 

Martin, whom the team calls the Shakespeare of Pop, has been involved at every step of the process, from auditions and rehearsals to opening night and recording the cast album. He imparted his philosophy — “Dare to suck” – to encourage his collaborators to take chances and experiment. 

“What I mean by that is that when you’re creating, you should feel free to express any idea, even if, in the moment, it feels odd or even bad,” Martin said in an email. “I’ve found that we can be too quick to judge when something pops into our heads. It takes a bit of courage to let a somewhat ‘odd idea out into the open, but a lot of the time it’s those ideas that end up making the biggest difference.” 

Sheppard credits some of the show’s early success to the group’s collective lack of onstage experience. “& Juliet” is a first for many; Sheppard as a Broadway director, Read as a musical writer, and Martin as a stage producer. 

“We had a wondrous naivete amongst us,” Sheppard says, “so we didn’t overthink it.”

When “& Juliet” made the leap across the pond to Broadway, Instagram and TikTok were vital in elevating its profile. New York-based advertising agency AKA, which worked on the show’s promotional campaign, took inspiration from Charlie Puth and other social media-savvy stars while crafting its digital presence. A key part of their strategy was posting lengthier clips from the production, which offered more context to theatergoers than the standard, montage-style trailers that many musicals typically use to entice audiences.

“We were hitting people over the head with the phrase ‘There’s life after Romeo,’” says AKA’s senior creative director Sam McMenamin. “It would be easy to give people the wrong idea — that this was a modern ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with pop songs. We really had to be clear.” 

The producers have ensured that “& Juliet” remains a hot ticket through fun casting choices (TikTok star Charli D’Amelio, ‘N Sync’s Joey Fatone and “Real Housewives” alum Kandi Burruss have joined the cast at various points), headline-making cameos (Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made a one-night appearance) and sing-along performances.

“We have done out-of-the-box things to keep the show fresh and keep the fans coming back,” says Eva Price, one of the show’s producers.

The strategy has worked. One enthusiast, 33-year-old New Yorker Hannah May, has attended more than 300 performances and estimates she sees the show twice a week. 

“It just has to do with the way the show makes me feel; the representation of women taking back their stories is so special,” she says. “Going to the show feels like a part of my life. If it’s been a couple of days and I haven’t seen it, I miss it and want to go back.”