NOTE: All of this is anecdotal and relating to my personal opinions, past opinions and experiences with musicals I have seen online.

So recently I watched my first official live musical theatre performance!
(all other live performances I have watched were school performances, since I'm relatively young and foreign)

Before going to watch it, I was a bit sceptical that the first show I would watch in an actual theatre would be the show &Juliet, for multiple reasons:

1. It is a jukebox musical, so the songs wouldn't be original to the musical. While I've never been a "musical purist", so to speak, and I've enjoyed jukebox musicals in the past (Mamma Mia and American Idiot), they'd used the music of a single group/artist, which flowed better in my opinion because songs by a certain group obviously tend to have similarities- things like genre, voice type, and the music itself. Particularly with American Idiot, the album of the same name by Green Day was made with the purpose of telling a story in the first place; therefore making it a perfect album to turn into a musical which could tell the story Green Day wanted to tell all along. For a song like Letterbomb, Billie Joe Armstrong meant for the song to be sung by a girl (Jesus of Suburbia's girlfriend) in the first place and this was finally achieved with the musical adaptation, effectively showing the struggles she had to go through because of Jesus and bringing even more meaning to this song. Now how does this relate to &Juliet? Well, &Juliet not only uses songs from a variety of artists (Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, etc.), but the range of genres is slightly bizarre. Act 1 ends on It's My Life by Bon Jovi, and then Act 2 begins on Love me Like You Do by Ellie Goulding- it's near baffling you'd find those in the same musical, let alone so close to one another! And then a couple songs later, the song Whataya want from me by Adam Lambert plays! I didn't think the musical would flow well at all, especially because of how different the songs are. Which brings me to my next point...

2. I was scared it would be pandering to the audience. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I thought it would be pandering to teenage girls, which is a demographic I am not a part of and was a bit sexist of me to assume, I apologise. It's a musical about feminism with a whole lot of pop songs, which, in my opinion, can have a tendency to get repetitive and not have much real meaning to them (songs like Roar by Katy Perry and Can't stop the feeling by Justin Timberlake- not saying you shouldn't like them of course, I just don't feel like they're hugely meaningful). I was scared it wouldn't feel like an actual musical because I thought it was meant to appeal to non-theatre fans by invoking 2000s nostalgia. Not to mention, I knew the musical has a non-binary character and I was terrified they would use them to "appease" the LGBTQIA+ community without developing the character at all. They sing a song by Britney Spears, "Not a Girl, Not yet a Woman", and I was hoping they wouldn't imply the character would become a woman eventually by the word "yet".
(NOTE: I do have toxic masculinity and gender identity issues that almost exacerbated my assumptions about this musical, just to put that out there; not that it excuses how I felt but just to add some context to my fears.)

Despite these doubts and fears, I watched the musical with my friends...and loved it. It was an amazing first official theatre experience and I wanted to go back and stay in the theatre forever. Despite much confusion regarding the plot, the music actually flowed really well and gave me appreciation for pop music in a whole new musical-theatre-esque light. I felt 2000s nostalgia without feeling left out of the target audience for the musical.
It left me with important lessons: Do not judge a book by its cover and do not judge a jukebox musical by the songs it chooses to use, plus don't stigmatise teenage girls. While this wasn't my favourite musical, it surprised me that it was nowhere near my least favourite either. It felt like any other good musical production, by which I mean it felt like the best thing in the world. Which led me to wonder...how? How did &Juliet so solidly establish itself as a musical despite how much it didn't seem like a musical?

1. Actors: This is an obvious one but the genuine talent of the performers contributes so much to a musical. The way the characters are portrayed, the energy they hold onstage, their background acting, their subtle actions and reactions as well as their chemistry with one another- the cast being amazing at this can make or break a musical. The cast I watched were all excellent at what they did- particularly, the actress for Juliet (Roshani Abbey) astounded me with her voice and the actress playing Anne Hathaway (I think Cassidy Hanson) reminded me so much of Amber Gray as Perspehone from Hadestown. The parallels between this and Hadestown were quite interesting actually, with Shakespeare and Hathaway being similar to Hades and Persephone while Romeo and Juliet were similar to Orpheus and Eurydice. Linking into Something Rotten as well, Shakespeare seems to have a large ego and a love of attention no matter what musical adaptation he's in. I get sidetracked, yes, but I thought this was interesting.

2. Orchestra: You don't realise how much the background music can change everything until you hear it changed. The orchestra was what made me care deeply unironically about this musical and the fate of the characters because of how well they built-up each song, in contrast to their backing tracks when they were simply regular pop songs. For instance, any time I've listened to the song Baby One More Time it has been for fun and because it's got a casual, chill beat. However, the musical used this song with a clear, hollow-sounding pulse in the background and little else backing it- leaving the effect of an empty room with Juliet's grief and fears like a pulse beating at the back of her head; consistently, deeply and loudly as she sings clearly. This also draws attention to Juliet's voice, and gives the impression that she is all alone in her grief and actually makes you feel sad at a Britney Spears song you associate with listening to with your cousins. You pay more attention to the lyrics in her voice due to the emptiness, which carries emotion and you start to actually listen to the song. With non-musical soundtracks, one tends not to pay attention to the lyrics- especially with pop songs in the modern day. Do you really care about the meaning behind Justin Bieber's words in Baby? Do you even know what the meaning of Despacito is? From my experience, most don't. It's quite sexual, by the way. You just tune in for the melody and to relax, without paying close attention to the lyrics. I still don't know the meaning behind On a Plain by Nirvana. However, with musical theatre, you need to pay attention to the lyrics to follow the plot, and thus tend to take in what is actually going on along with everything else, and can therefore (from what I've noticed) overwhelm you more easily than a regular pop song. So, with an orchestra essentially shining a light on the song and its lyrics, the feeling of it being musical theatre is amplified and you really pay attention to the characters and what they are saying- also because you can see it happening and who is saying which line. This means the orchestra is integral to this production and makes emotional songs more emotional by using the orchestra effectively to highlight this for this scenario, rather than just drop a beat and have the sad lyrics over that. It does help that all the songs in the soundtrack were originally produced by the same person (Max Martin), which also allows for the songs to flow well into one another; and the addition of having a good orchestra with a theme and a personality to it that sticks throughout the musical allows this musical to sound way more grounded than expected and actually sound like a theatre production rather than a mismatched group of songs attached to a play.

3. Harmonies: This one personally matters a lot to me as a reason why this musical actually stood out as a musical (first-most important being the orchestra), and why jukebox musicals before this one (American Idiot) have managed to make their claims as unique musicals, separate to the original songwriters. The sort of harmony that can be evoked in theatre is the kind you do not hear on solo albums and songs by regular artists, and is so much more powerful in blowing the audience away in a musical. Take American Idiot, where the titular song used harmonies, different people delivering different lines, canon- all to culminate in a solid opening number. Lin Manuel Miranda in particular knows this very well, with songs like Non-stop, Blackout and his latest We Don't Talk about Bruno really making use of the sheer power of overlapping harmonies to tell different people's stories. Now obviously &Juliet does not do harmonies as complexly as Lin Manuel Miranda himself (who spent years writing something like Hamilton) but they improved every single song they played (in my opinion) by adding harmonies to increase the richness and power the music had. The song Problem (the 'I got one less problem without ya' song) also used this really well with the female ensemble members singing Juliet's thoughts while the male ensemble members were singing Romeo's- simpler than Miranda's work but the idea behind it is similar, right? Many other musicals also use this and &Juliet combining 2 good pop songs to make this energetic musical piece is just really satisfying and solidifies it as musical theatre, in my opinion.
The song Blow really stood out because of this and is one of my favourite numbers in this musical because the lower harmonies they added to the chorus blew me away (pun intended) and increased the resonance of the song by so much. The song was already a bop before, but adding the harmonies made me take the song seriously- something which can be quite difficult with pop songs, but the orchestra and harmonies made all the difference, leading me to care about the musical beyond nostalgia for the Backstreet Boys.

4. Stagecraft and choreography: Ok, this is also kind of obvious as well but the above 3 do not work without the stagecraft, do they. The aforementioned song Problem would be significantly less energising without the bold choreography and the way the company comes together. I'm not sure if all performances have the revolving stage (the kind used in Hadestown and Hamilton as well) but oh my gods did it make everything so much more powerful! The song Domino really benefited from this as they travelled to Paris (yeah the plot starts weird and ends weirder, but it grows on you), really adding to the sense of a new beginning. The use of the revolving stage really amplified the already-present talent and added to the theatrics of a performance of a musical-theatre-esque pop song. Also the bit at the end of Blow with Juliet on the chandelier? Absolutely amazing, the flashing lights made this so amazing and...free. It was unapologetically loud and shining and heck, even flying- really was a sight to behold. They do a really good job on the visuals, especially the lighting.

5. Self-awareness: Finally, the last but not the least one. This musical used self-awareness brilliantly, not only by parodying Shakespeare but by making this a story within a story. This means that it doesn't actually matter how much sense the story makes because it's ultimately a writing competition between Will Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, yet they still have the plot tie together in a nice way at the end despite the mass confusion. We have no idea how Romeo just-- came back and knew exactly how to find Juliet because if Shakespeare means there to be plot convenience then there shalt be plot convenience. If the entire story seems plot-convenient, the musical embraces that with Hathaway and Shakespeare trying to have more and more control over the script and inventing more and more scenarios. Everything that doesn't make sense in the Romeo-Juliet story has the simple reason behind it that the in-universe authors simply don't actually care, and that right there is a stroke of genius allowing for the most creative storylines imaginable. As for the real authors, they're just having a fun time coming up with stuff as long as the message behind the story is clear- that women deserve stories of their own volitions and experiences in a world that was dominated by male authors and protagonists. Furthermore, they do know how to make fun, the writers. Love Me Like You Do in the start of Act 2, a song that is basically a joke amongst people I know atleast, is not taken seriously at all. It's just a melodramatic, lovesick Romeo singing while Juliet watches exasperatedly. They knew how to make Baby One More Time emotional, but I was so sure I'd get to make fun of the musical during Love Me Like You Do- but it turned out they were already a step ahead and I was pleasantly surprised and found it quite funny.

In conclusion, these are my thoughts on why &Juliet works, despite it being a relatively controversial musical with lots of almost unrelated pop songs. I would highly recommend watching it if you want to go out and just have a bit of fun!