Celine Dion, Ariane Grande, Pink and Shakespeare: how Broadway writer of ‘& Juliet’ put pop hits into Bard’s tale of Montagues and Capulets
- Schitt’s Creek writer David West Read explains how he matched pop hits to Romeo and Juliet, saying: ‘I really tried to let story and character drive it’
- So he has Juliet sing Britney Spears’ ‘Baby One More Time’ in her suicide scene and Adam Lambert’s ‘Whataya Want From Me’ become a duet between arguing lovers
We first see Juliet in the Capulet tomb, devastated. She wakes up to see her Romeo dead. But before she plunges a dagger into her heart, she starts … singing. What comes out is, improbably, a Britney Spears hit.
“Oh, baby, baby. How was I supposed to know? That something wasn’t right here? Oh, baby, baby. I shouldn’t have let you go,” she sings, the opening lines of … “Baby One More Time”.
That such a pop song works perfectly in this august scene is a credit to playwright David West Read and the team behind the Broadway jukebox musical & Juliet.
They’ve taken an original story using Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare’s play about a romance between two people from feuding families – the Montagues and Capulets – as a launch pad and mixed in some of the biggest pop hits of the past few decades by Spears, Celine Dion, NSYNC, Ariana Grande, Katy Perry, Jon Bon Jovi, The Weeknd, Justin Timberlake, Pink and Backstreet Boys.
“I really tried to let story and character drive it,” says Read, an Emmy-winning writer from Schitt’s Creek. “It’s a long process to make it seem effortless, but it’s a lot of effort.”
