David West Read book reimagines Shakespeare as a sexist hack
For aficionados of the poster art at Joe Allen restaurant, there is now the Broadway kitsch of seeing Paulo Szot play the very senior member of a boy band in “& Juliet.” This jukebox musical opened Thursday at Broadway’s Stephen Sondheim Theatre after a run on London’s West End.
Szot, an erstwhile star of the Metropolitan Opera, won a Tony for playing Emile de Becque in “South Pacific, and he successfully recycles his French accent from that 2008 revival to play the father of Juliet’s love interest in this new musical with a book by David West Read and hit tunes by Max Martin “and Friends,” as the credits explain it.
The male love interest is no longer Romeo but a character named Francois (Philippe Arroyo) who is not the creation of William Shakespeare (Stark Sands) but his wife, Anne Hathaway (Betsy Wolfe), who thinks it’s sexist to bump off Juliet (Lorna Courtney) at the end of “Romeo and Juliet.” Anne concocts another story that has the Bard’s Juliet traveling to Paris to meet Francois and his father (Szot), who team up to bring back their boy band so they can sing “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back),” written by Martin and one of those aforementioned “friends,” Denniz Pop.
Long before Szot becomes arguably the oldest boy ever to sing “Everybody” on stage, Read’s book shows signs of doing to jukebox musicals what his “Schitt’s Creek” scripts did to wealthy families on reality TV shows.
