If you have ever wondered, “How many terrible pop songs has Max Martin co-written?”, then the answer can be found by sitting through & Juliet.

I hated everything about this show, from the ampersand on down. The concept, credited to a Schitt’s Creek writer called David West Read, supposes that Juliet, a 13-year-old Italian girl, doesn’t die at the end of Romeo & Juliet, which is kind of the point of the whole thing. So in this show, Juliet (played last night by understudy Rachel Webb, who can really sing) comes out of her self-induced coma, sees Romeo’s corpse, and decides, Meh, I’ll live. The concept is emboldened by depicting William Shakespeare and his wife Ann Hathaway as the authors of the text. Ann, an annoying 21st century character, bosses around the world’s greatest playwright, forcing him to make 21st century changes to a play that was written around 1595, because there is nothing this generation likes more than reinventing the past to make themselves feel better. 

Everything about the show - the woke politics, the bullying feminism, the colourblind casting, the inclusion of non-binary characters - is ultra modern. Usually with Shakespeare, this doesn’t matter. But this is a show that reinterprets the intentions of the writer. At one point, Romeo is described as ‘a douche.’ Why, because he died for love? And it’s no secret that in the end, Juliet decides to embark on her life without a man, because she is “Stronger” (yes, another awful Max Martin song). 

It also irritated me that the ‘sort of’ gay character, Francois, hooks up with the non-binary character named May (played by a guy). Do people think gay men are hooking up with the non-binary? When I check out websites like Chaturbate and Scruff, I see no evidence of this, but I might be wrong. After all, who is going to argue sexual politics with a guy who used to write for Schitt’s Creek? To be clear, this is not a production of Romeo and Juliet, nor does it use much if any of Shakespeare’s actual text. It’s more like an after school special. Indeed, the show seems aimed clearly at teenage girls into cutting and Instagram. 

I went to the show with my old show queen pal Howard Kane, who recently retired from running The Children’s Theatre Project, which trained young performers for musical theatre. “This is the kind of show my students would love to put on,” he told me. I get it. Young people would rather scream out Max Martin songs than learn Sondheim or Lerner and Lowe or Ebb and Kander. The musical theatre isn’t quite dead, but it is becoming nauseating. (Could  anyone sit through this year’s Tony Awards?) & Juliet is the kind of show I might find in the litter box in the morning. It can stay there.