STEPHANIE RUSSO: & Juliet is a jukebox musical that utilises the many, many hits of the Swedish pop mega-producer Max Martin to reimagine the story of Romeo & Juliet. In this queer, feminist, modern and diverse retelling, Juliet does not die, but instead lives to go party in Paris and sing “…Baby, One More Time”. What more could you want?
Currently playing at the Lyric Theatre in Sydney, & Juliet is delightful, and offers the best representation of Anne Hathaway I’ve seen in any piece of work about Shakespeare.
However, in the weeks since I’ve seen the show I’ve been thinking about what kind of reading of Romeo & Juliet is reflected in & Juliet.
& Juliet’s emphasis on a twenty-first-century feminist reimagining of Shakespeare’s play obliquely suggests, I would argue, that Shakespeare’s ending reflects an inability to imagine a happy ending or, perhaps more significantly, a happy ending for a female character. That Romeo & Juliet is a tragedy is understood as a failure of the imagination, or simply disappointing, particularly in the eyes of Anne Hathaway.
Anne, out on the town after securing a babysitter for her children back home in Stratford-upon-Avon, is dissatisfied by the ending of this tragedy. Anne wants to revive Juliet because she wants a happy ending for a woman. This position is completely understandable, and perhaps even one shared by the audience, but it also suggests that Shakespeare was too sexist to allow Juliet anything to do but die.
Maybe I’m just taking things a bit too seriously, but the inference here that Shakespeare was just another white man who didn’t know how to write women has increasingly been grating on me. Juliet has long been the character from the play that has captured the imagination of audiences. It is Juliet who appears to grow and change most significantly in the play; while Romeo acts impulsively and other men consistently fail her, Juliet is always self-aware and intelligent. Juliet is beloved, and that’s because Shakespeare was so good at writing women: there’s a reason why actresses clamour to play her!
In her excellent book Searching for Juliet, Sophie Duncan explores how Juliet has become something of an Agony Aunt for generations of young lovers. Knowing full well that she is fictional, men and women of all ages write to Juliet for romantic advice. That drive to speak to Juliet specifically—and not to Romeo—reflects the pull that Juliet has over readers and audiences. Juliet seems to speak to us so strongly that she is understood to have something to say about modern relationship dilemmas.
One of the most interesting moments in the play is at the end of the first Act, when Shakespeare decides to revive Romeo from the dead with no explanation. He wants chaos! In that brief moment, we see a Shakespeare who was able to radically reimagine existing stories and create something wholly new and unexpected. Even Anne, who has hitherto taken charge of the direction of the story, is shocked. However, throughout the second Act, all that Shakespeare seems to want to do with Romeo is to move him back into the role of the romantic lead and back towards Juliet, seemingly unable to imagine a Juliet without a Romeo, despite his self-professed proclivity for chaos.
& Juliet reflects that conviction in Juliet’s centrality to the play, but the apparently triumphant ending of the musical is a bit disappointing. The musical leans into Romeo’s identity as a self-confessed “douche,” but then has Juliet increasingly drawn to him anyway, even though it is not quite clear what this intelligent, self-possessed woman sees in him. At the end of the musical, Juliet and Romeo have decided to date and see where things go, but it is unclear why she makes this choice, aside from the sheer inevitability of Romeo and Juliet as a romantic pairing. If you’re going to go for a girlboss ending, why not lean in?
There is an argument to be made that Shakespeare is a much more radical writer than this modern-day take. Romeo & Juliet is far more willing to test out conceptions of love, and its boundaries and consequences, than what ends up being a fairly conventional romcom where everyone ends up in their ‘rightful’ place. For all the (completely misguided) insistence that Anne Hathaway’s character is not seen by Shakespeare, as she is only worth the second-best bed in his will, and that she wants Juliet to make choices of her own, unlike her husband who only wants her to die, & Juliet completely elides why we side with Juliet. The play’s Juliet can see their peril where Romeo cannot. Juliet makes choices when her options are few, and yet despite being given complete agency in the musical, her ending is far more conventional than the desperate gamble she takes in the play.
In a way, & Juliet almost accidentally replicates the processes of early modern authorship. Shakespeare and Anne collaborate on knitting together this new story, testing out ideas and experimenting with alternative endings and the introduction of unexpected new elements. From what we know of the early modern stage, Shakespeare would have worked in a similar manner, collaborating with his fellow actors, and perhaps even asking other playwrights to fill in details. It’s refreshing to see a Shakespeare who doesn’t write away in his room by himself, inspired by some kind of divine muse, but a Shakespeare who lives, works and writes on the stage.
However, taken as a whole, & Juliet provides what I would argue is quite a shallow reading of the play. The musical is certainly joyful and fun, and I had a great night out. But what does it say about Romeo and Juliet as a piece of art that has endured centuries? Not very much, in the end, except for the fact that we like the “& Juliet” part more. But we already knew that.
Australian Reception Network 