Vanessa Sears, Julia McLellan, Matt Raffy and Sarah Nairne in & Juliet | Photo by Dahlia Katz

My biggest surprise of 2025, I fell pretty hard for & Juliet. I’ve been a little obsessed, actually, and am seeing it again next month. Though it’s pretty silly, my appreciation for it keeps growing upon continued reflection. It’s not that the story is all that deep, but it’s an absolute banger in terms of its craft. There is so much going on under the hood of the neon-lit, bubble-gum flavoured aesthetic of this Shakespearean/pop-hit fusion. It’s silly, yes, but it proves that you can show an audience an unabashedly good time without insulting their intelligence.

I’ve already reviewed it (you can read that here), that’s not what this is. Neither will I get into the weeds with the cleverness of David West Read’s book and how it press-gangs over two decades of Max Martin songs into a cohesive shape (Howard Ho has a great video about that!). I won’t even elaborate on my theory of fate as a star-spinning cosmic DJ. At the risk of revealing as much about my own neuroses as the show itself, I’d like to shout out a specific aspect of & Juliet that I found personally significant and which actually allowed me to surrender to it. Continue Reading