We should do this more often!
Considering that we both like music and enjoy the occasional live gig, I’m surprised that as a married couple we hadn’t attended a live musical in over 7 years! And only 2 total musicals since we’ve been married (and that’s coming on 12 years now!? Like what the! But we attended our first in the post-COVID era last Saturday, and our first at the Lyric Theatre. And here’s an account of our experience.
Coming into it, I had no preconceived expectations about ‘& Juliette’, all I knew was that the story’s preface was that “what if Juliette (from Romeo & Juliette) had survived!? So armed with only that little piece of knowledge, we trekked out into the horrible weather (constant rain all day), jumped on the light rail and found ourselves at The Star.
The type of audience & Juliette attracted wasn’t what we had expected, we thought the crowd would be more like us, i.e. late thirties/early forties- children of the 90s-00s. But the audience was markedly older (more like late thirties and early forties if this was 1999). But it was all good, as long as the crowd got into it! And didn’t they!
So, as not to give too much of the show away, but this is what I’m going to say, imagine Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge? Yes, you can take yourself back to the early 2000s, remember how the story was moved along through the use of pop-songs as replacement for spoken dialogue? Remember how they would use the exact lyrics of a song, taken completely out of context and fitted into a scene between characters? And remember how it all came together, although anyone in their right mind wouldn’t of dreamt to use that song for that scene? So yeah, & Juliette adopts this exact same method, but instead of using an eclectic playlist from across several decades, however it only uses 90-00s pop songs written by Max Martin, who penned hits like ‘Baby one more time’ (Brittney Spears), ‘Larger than life’ (Backstreet Boys), ‘I kissed a girl’ (Katy Perry) etc. And the list goes on and on for 30 or more songs! And aside from the nostalgic pop songs, the stage production was next level, and all the musicians and singers were radio perfect! At many points I was convinced that the singers were just lip syncing and they were just singing along to a backing track (no live band), but no, no! They were all singing live, and the band came out for the curtain call, which deserved a standing Ovation! As the band were flawless, no mis-steps all night (very impressive), particularly the bass player! At parts, with the no doubt expensive sound system at the Lyric theatre, the sweet bass tones could be felt through your chest cavity, which made the performance so much fun!
So, the production was great, the storyline was surprisingly good and captivating, the performers were top notch, and although the Lyric theatre was starting to show its age- but it was super convenient to get to and the audio visual system was out of this world! So, we had so much fun we want to do this again real soon! Hamilton anyone?