POP GOES THE BARD

A jukebox musical that thrilled its
fans while leaving this critic wishing
the story mattered as much as the songs

The company of the North American Tour of & Juliet

As I was settling into my seat at the gorgeous Auditorium Theatre, awaiting the start of the touring production of & Juliet, I noticed the person next to me watching a video on their phone. Having nothing better to do, I peeked—I am notoriously nosy, and attempts to shame me for it will prove futile—and saw they were watching a video on how to prepare for a colonoscopy. Once I recovered from my surprise, I realized that if, like me, you were a young person around the peak of the Max Martin era—around the turn of the century—you’d be nearing, or just about at, the age where that unpleasant procedure is first recommended. It was a sobering realization of how time flies. One day you’re jumping and screaming with a thousand others at a concert; the next you’re a cranky critic in an auditorium wondering why the hell they have to keep the damn room so cold.

Joey Fatone

Some of you might not know the name Max Martin, but you’ve almost certainly heard his songs. He’s one of the most successful—if not the most successful—songwriters of the last several decades, having written thirty number-one hits, in addition to dozens of other charting songs. Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Celine Dion, and many more owe some of their biggest hits to his ability to craft immensely catchy bops that worm their way into your subconscious and stay there, whether you like them or not.

CJ Eldred and the company

With a book by David West Read and a selection of Martin’s biggest hits, & Juliet imagines an alternative Romeo and Juliet; one where Anne Hathaway—Shakespeare’s wife, not the Oscar-winning actress—irritated by Juliet’s suicide after Romeo’s, wrests control of the play from William Shakespeare and sends Juliet on a journey to Paris with two best friends and her faithful nurse in tow. There she will meet a handsome, shy young man and promptly get engaged to be married. Complications ensue, are melodramatically resolved, and the entire mess is neatly untangled, giving us not one, but three happy endings.

It is all completely silly, and entirely irrelevant.

Plot doesn’t matter here. Neither do the characters. Or the quality of the performances, as good as they are. I’d go further and add that the songs don’t matter either.

Fabiola Caraballo Quijada and Joseph Torres

What matters is the built-in audience for those songs. This is less of a musical than a best-of collection—or a commemorative concert—for the fans. One could argue that that could be said of most jukebox musicals, but that is not true. Most jukebox musicals—at least the ones that I’ve seen—try to naturally integrate the songs into the narrative. Some do it rather well, Hell’s Kitchen being a sterling recent example. & Juliet doesn’t even try. It’s the other way around here. It’s as if a list of songs was assembled first, and the narrative and characters were tortuously twisted to fit them; a particularly appalling example comes in Act One, where Spears’ “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” is retrofitted to become the theme song for a non-binary character. In keeping with the concert theme, the individual numbers are directed and choreographed like MTV videos circa 1999. Nostalgia hit notwithstanding, if you’re not part of the fandom, the overexuberant spectacle and bombast start to wear thin. It wasn’t until the Act One closer, Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life,” that I perked up. A witty and genuinely surprising reintroduction of Romeo into the narrative, it was the show’s first sign of real creativity.

Fabiola Caraballo Quijada

The second act is a considerable improvement on the first, peaking with Celine Dion’s “That’s the Way It Is,” reconfigured as a duet between Hathaway and Juliet. After that, however, the show falls off a cliff.

Fabiola Caraballo Quijada and the company

So why the two stars, then? One is for the almost uniformly splendid cast, who sing, dance, and mug their hearts out. CJ Eldred and Crystal Kellogg make for immensely appealing and charming Shakespeare and Hathaway. As Juliet, Fabiola Caraballo Quijada, despite her youth, absolutely owns the stage and is a phenomenal singer. Noah Marlowe makes for a charming romantic lead, and Nico Ochoa gives depth and feeling to a character that seems to have been assembled by committee. My favorite turns came from Joseph Torres as Romeo and Kathryn Allison as Juliet’s nurse; their performances are pitched at the perfect tenor for this sort of production, and Allison is brilliant in her monologue, possibly the best piece of writing in a very weak book. The other star is for the humor, which is plentiful, and thank heavens for that. Even if helmer Luke Sheppard directs his cast to go as broad as possible—exaggerated double takes, eyes bulging out, reactions more suited to Looney Tunes. There’s no room for subtlety here—but a good portion of the jokes land, and land hard.

The company

It doesn’t surprise me that & Juliet was a huge hit. I cannot think of another show where there was such a huge disconnect between this critic’s experience and the audience’s reaction. Shortly after the Celine Dion number, there is a clumsy and labored setup for the next spectacle. From the first line it was obvious to me what was coming. It makes no sense within the context of the show at all, but “Backstreet’s Back” is one of Martin’s biggest hits ever; logical or not, it had to be shoehorned into the show somehow. Following the song, the roar from the audience was so long and sustained that it literally stopped the show, with the actors standing awkwardly, facing the audience, and trying to figure out what to do while waiting for the applause and screaming to subside.

Noah Marlowe and Nico Ochoa

There’s no room for critical evaluation in the face of that kind of adoration.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to schedule a colonoscopy appointment. My doctor says I’m overdue.

Kathryn Allison and Paul-Jordan Jansen

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photos by Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade Matthew Murphy

& Juliet
North American tour
Broadway In Chicago
The Auditorium, 50 E. Ida B. Wells Dr. in Chicago
2 hours, 30 minutes with intermission
Tues at 7; Wed at 1 & 7; Thurs at 7; Fri at 7:30; Sat at 2 & 7:30; Sun at 1
ends on August 2, 2026 in Chicago
for tickets ($49–$175), call 312.977.1717 or visit Broadway In Chicago
tour continues; for dates and cities, visit & Juliet

for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago

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