“Two households, both alike in dignity …” is “Romeo and Juliet’s” famous opening line. Well, maybe not that much alike in dignity, if the households are Shakespeare and Britney Spears.
The musical theater world was not aware that it needed a mashup of those two, but, lo and behold, in 2019, the jukebox musical comedy “& Juliet” bowed in England and was a hit. The radical reshaping of the world’s most famous love story is now mostly missing Romeo (hence the title) but is filled with the songs of Swedish hitmaker Max Martin, who has had 25 No. 1 singles since 1998, for Spears, the Backstreet Boys, Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry, Pink and others.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Broadway in Atlanta
Credit: Photo courtesy of Broadway in Atlanta
“Max Martin wrote the soundtrack of the last 30 years, so in a way he is our Shakespeare,” says Rachel Simone Webb, who plays Juliet in the national touring company that opens at the Fox Theatre on Jan. 7. The book is by David West Read, one of the writers on the TV comedy “Schitt’s Creek.”
“It picks up right at the end of the play as she sees what her lover has done,” Webb says. “She picks up his dagger and sings a song about how she doesn’t want to die. She sings ‘Baby One More Time’ by Britney Spears. It’s funny at first, and audiences usually laugh at the beginning, but you’re not going to hear the up-tempo version; it’s a ballad.”
From there, the musical sends Juliet off on a journey of romantic entanglements and female empowerment, with help from Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway (not the actress but a character with the same name) and Juliet’s nonbinary best friend, May, who brings new meaning to the song “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.”
Although colorblind casting has become pretty much the norm in musical theater, Webb says it is nonetheless special to be a Black actress playing Shakespeare’s Juliet. “When I see little Black girls in the audience and their eyes light up, it’s exciting to see,” she says. “I feel like I’m doing something right.
“There’s a different nuance, there’s a different source that comes with telling the story from a place of the pain that I might have gone through in my life, that I feel. I feel a sense of responsibility with the role of Juliet, knowing that my skin is darker than the Juliet that people might expect.”
Webb grew up in Dallas in a musical household; her mother was a singer and her father a drummer. “I had the music in me from a very early age,” she says. Her first singing was done in church, and by age 6 she says she was pointing toward some kind of life as a performer.
A homemade video of her covering Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” went viral on YouTube, which caught the attention of Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show producers when Webb was about 14 years old.
“They wanted me to send them a video of a song, so I did the Katy Perry song ‘Roar.’ And now in ‘& Juliet,’ that song is the biggest number at the end, with the most exciting theatrics and pyrotechnics and colors on stage,” Webb says. “It’s such a blessing, wow, to be able to sing that song in my Beyoncé moment when I learned it at 14 years old.”
Her first major professional role was the Broadway production of “& Juliet,” as a member of the ensemble and understudy for Juliet. She had gone on in the lead role 145 times, she said, and asked if she could become the Broadway lead when the role opened up.
Instead, the producers offered her the lead in the national touring company.
“And that meant the world to me, just to hear the words, ‘We would like to offer you the role of Juliet.’ It meant that the work that I was doing was impacting people,” she says.
In December, superfan/Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made her Broadway debut in a specially created, one-night-only walk-on role in the Broadway production of “& Juliet,” where not long ago Webb was in the ensemble.
“I would have been right next to her, and I would have held her hand,” Webb says. “It’s so exciting to see that this world is mixing now with the political spectrum in the most positive way.”
From its plot-reversing opener to its joyous finale, “& Juliet” is the opposite of a classic tragedy. Or to paraphrase Shakespeare: “Never was there a tale of less woe/ Than this of Juliet, without Romeo.”
THEATER PREVIEW
“& Juliet”
Jan. 7-12 at the Fox Theatre. $34.50-$194. 660 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta. 855-285-8499. foxtheatre.org
