Romeo & Juliet, the original star-crossed lovers story we all know and love and learn in 9th grade English class, has a new musical theatre adaptation called: & Juliet. You can probably already tell by the title what makes this version different from the original. It’s centered around Juliet, women, and overall female empowerment. While Juliet is the main protagonist, there are other female characters presented to represent the different ways women have been unseen and disempowered by men. By focusing the story on Juliet and her life after choosing not to off herself despite Romeo being gone, & Juliet shows the journey of a young girl realizing her own power and worth. & Juliet transforms Romeo & Juliet from a dramatic tragedy to a classic coming of age story that the audience can sing and dance along to. 

First things first, let me explain the storyline. At the beginning it starts with Juliet waking up from the potion she took to appear dead just as it happens in Romeo & Juliet. However, Juliet then decides to move on from Romeo and run away with her friends to discover who she is without Romeo. But why did Juliet make this change? Basically throughout the musical we see William Shakespeare himself write the original play and things start to change when his wife, Anne Hathaway, has a few ideas she wants to try out. Shakespeare and Hathaway, a husband and wife, a man and a woman, have very different ideas of what they think should happen to a 13 year old girl. 

Shakespeare, a man, wrote a story about a girl risking everything including her own life for a guy she knew for three days, while Hathaway wrote about a girl, like herself, trying to find her way in a male dominated world. As the musical goes on and characters struggle with internal and external conflicts, Shakespeare and Hathaway reflect on their personal issues. While he went off to become a famous writer, Hathaway spent her days tending to their children, barely having a life of her own. Hathaway fights for her own power in & Juliet, something that she didn’t get to do when she was alive. The parallels highlighted between Anne Hathaway and Juliet in & Juliet show how difficult it can be to feel inner power as a woman in both old and modern societies. This new musical is all together fun, modern, quirky, honest, and uplifting. If you like musicals and are not misogynistic, be sure to check out & Juliet!