Hit Me Baby One More Time! In this case, because I am falling asleep as I’m so bored.

I have never been a fan of What If? scenarios. All those what if Germany had successfully invaded Britain? And then alternate universes like His Dark Materials. It always seems lazy writing. However, & Juliet appeared an interesting concept with a world where Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway battle to create the perfect sequel to Romeo and Juliet; one where the lovers did not die. A decent enough idea. And that’s where the interest ended. Within the first ten minutes I was bored and checking the time.

The plot by David West Read is weak and full of more holes than the roads of Birmingham after a bad winter. The major chasm was the fact that once Romeo returned, nobody mentioned that Juliet’s proposed marriage to Francois could not happen because by not being dead, Romeo was still her husband. The reveal only happened at the convenient critical point it was needed towards the end. Yeah, husband survived and quite normal to forget you are still married to them. It is normal, isn’t it? Hmm, I thought not. And I can’t say I recall many of the characters, including Romeo’s best friend who is introduced at the beginning of Act Two as a device then discarded and not heard of again once their usefulness was at an end. And all of this was before we got to the script itself. The dialogue so incoherent at times it went in one ear and out of the other.

And the same level of forgettable can be said for the music. It was dire, all sounding extremely generic and even the two Britney Spears songs that I recognised (… Baby One More Time and Oops!… I Did It Again) were insipid due to the amount they had been watered down.

Composer, Max Martin has been described as a Hitmaker, and his success is hard to dispute. But the world of pop music has always been filled with those who inflict onto us what I like to call Dustbin Music. In other words, listen to it, like it, then lose it in the trash where it belongs once you’ve tired of it. Such was my experience of & Juliet. So much so, I am not going to bother listing any other numbers, because there are none of note. Even Can’t Stop the Feeling, which I have performed myself, isn’t as good as the version in the Trolls movie.

I can appreciate, I was not a fan to begin with, but I can say despite me believing I would be in the minority with my criticism, the audience were clearly also divided between loving it and wanting to be anywhere but the Birmingham Hippodrome.

I must give some credit, though. The performances of Jay McGuiness (Shakespeare), Geraldine Sacdalan (Juliet), Lara Denning (Anne), Sandra Marvin (Angelique), Jordan Broatch (May), Kyle Cox (Francois) and Ben Jackson-Walker (Romeo) were all okay, given the material they had to work with. Not sure what Ranj Singh, a former Daytime TV Doctor playing Lance added to this show, though, but he looked like, erm, a former Daytime TV Doctor appearing in a show.

Musical supervision was courtesy of Bill Sherman with choreography from Jennifer Weber. The director was Luke Sheppard. & Juliet was a long two and a half hours to endure, and I won’t return to it in a hurry.

Cheers.

Antony N Britt

*Photos taken from the public domain and may not represent the actual performance reviewed.