NEW YORK — William Shakespeare still occupies his storied place in high school English classes, but the Elizabethan dude is under attack. Instead of dreaming at their desks of their Romeos, today’s teenage girls are more likely to figure out that Juliet gets merely a single night of passion with just one, self-absorbed boyfriend before she gets snuffed out forever. Raw deal for a young kid. Ergo, problematic author.
Enter “& Juliet,” a savvy if stunningly unsubtle mashup of a musical from London that aims to redress that balance for Broadway fun and profit. This nonstop party-empowerment show gets its theme of feminist revisionist British history from “Six,” its Shakespearean humor from “Something Rotten,” its nonbinary savvy from “Head Over Heels,” and its collage-like spectacle from “Moulin Rouge.”
The book by David West Read then adds a dose of tipsy British panto, puts the frothy milkshake in a hipster blender, and mixes the whole deconstructionist shebang to music made famous by the likes of Ellie Goulding, Katy Perry and Ariana Grande. The whipped cream on the top is the amply sampled song stylings of Britney Spears, herself a onetime Juliet, whom much of the target audience for this musical have adopted as an artist in need of rescue.
