When David West Read – an Emmy-winning writer and executive producer on the hit comedy Schitt’s Creek – was asked to pitch a musical based on the work of Swedish songwriting powerhouse Max Martin, little did he know he would soon be lying in a dark room with a concussion.

“It was 2016 and I had hit my head on the underside of a kitchen cabinet,” Read says, laughing. “And I was suffering from dizziness and had some vision problems and was basically lying in the dark and not looking at screens. So I used that time to listen to Max Martin – there are worse things you can do in the dark – and it was in that concussed and somewhat groggy state that I came up with the musical.”

Now, some would say, unkindly, that a lot of musicals sound as if they were created when the writer was concussed, but Read had Martin’s music on his side; big pop hits such as Baby One More Time (Britney Spears), I Want It That Way (Backstreet Boys), Teenage Dream (Katy Perry), It’s My Life (Bon Jovi) and Can’t Feel My Face (The Weeknd).

“With the best jukebox musicals, you find what is unique to that artist and let the story grow out of that,” says Read. “So, because Max has been writing pop songs for 30, 35 years, and because Max has a particular, Swedish tone, which he has said is sometimes described as ‘dancing with tears in your eyes’ – it’s sad songs that make you feel good.

“And it felt like so many of his songs are about heartache and heartbreak and young love, which led me to the ultimate story of heartbreak and young love, which is Romeo and Juliet.”

And so we have & Juliet, which reimagines the end to Shakespeare’s well-known tragedy and asks: What if Juliet didn’t die? What if, instead of killing herself upon discovering Romeo’s lifeless body, she ran away to Paris? And what if she did it while belting out Kelly Clarkson’s Since U Been Gone?

“I really give a lot of credit to Max,” says Read. “He was so open to it – ‘Hey, we’re going to take all of your life’s work and we’re going to put it into Shakespeare, and people are going to be speaking in rhyming couplets and dancing around in Shakespearean costumes and singing Baby One More Time.’

“And he was so on board with that because I think he knew he didn’t want to do something expected. He didn’t want to do the story of a pop star or the story of a boy band, it had to be something that felt really out of the box and creatively exciting to him.”

When it premiered on London’s West End in 2019, & Juliet was an instant hit, picking up three Laurence Olivier Awards, including best actress in a musical. It opened on Broadway in 2022 and then a year later in Melbourne. Now, after more than 200 performances, the Australian production comes to Sydney with Lorinda May Merrypor as the titular heroine.

“I’m just running and jumping up and down the whole time,” says Merrypor. “For a while there I had shin splints. And I was like, ‘Why do I have shin splints?’ Then I see videos of myself, jumping and running around on stage, and I’m like, ‘Oh, that makes sense’.”

And the best bit is she doesn’t have to die in this one.

“Exactly!” says Merrypor. “I just get to run around and pretend to go to Paris and dance on top of bars and swing on chandeliers.”

As you can guess, Merrypor’s Juliet is not the tear-stained young girl popularly imagined – think Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. Instead, this Juliet has enough smarts to imagine a life for herself that is not dictated by Romeo (who has been described as a charming “peak himbo f---boy” in one review) or her family. “My Juliet is just so bubbly, which comes a lot from my personal personality,” says Merrypor.

& Juliet is Merrypor’s first lead role, one that has given her just as much confidence on stage as off.

“I’ve grown so much personally just from getting to play Juliet,” says Merrypor. “I was always a bit quiet, wouldn’t stand up for myself, a little bit shy, but getting to tell this story every night, of someone who really takes agency of her own story – and one of my favourite lines of hers is ‘I really love me’ – and I think by saying that every day, it really starts to become true.”

Apart from being her first lead role, Merrypor also carries the weight of representation. A Kuungkari and South Sea Islander woman from Rockhampton in Queensland, Merrypor has been inundated with fans saying how much it means to see an Indigenous woman in a leading role.

“I’m getting messages from mothers, telling me how much their kid just lit up when I was on the stage, and kids are going home and saying to their parents, ‘I want to be a performer, I want to do singing lessons or dancing lessons now’. And that’s so, so special to me because when I was younger I didn’t have someone to look up to like that. I just had a delusional belief that ‘Oh, it’s going to happen, I just gotta keep going’. And lucky enough, it did.

“But the impact of having that representation there, it definitely instils so much belief … I try not to think too deeply about it too much because I will cry all the time. But any time I get one of those messages, or I meet some young kids at the stage door, it feels so, so heartwarming.”

And if you think standing on stage regurgitating a Britney Spears song is easy, or writing a musical around pre-written songs is a breeze, both Read and Merrypor are here to disagree.

“Some people might think it’s easier to do a jukebox musical because the songs have already been written,” says Read. “I think it’s extremely difficult to do well because you have nothing but constraints. I chose not to change any of the lyrics in the songs, aside from the pronouns, and trying to make those lyrics fit the story is like a puzzle, and it’s a puzzle that I find really interesting and exciting.”

Merrypor agrees: “[The songs] have been so expertly linked to the story that I almost forget they were sung before, they feel so true to the story. There are a few moments, in particular Since U Been Gone, that it feels like it was written for the musical. It feels like I’m telling Juliet’s story, rather than just standing here and singing a song [everybody knows].”

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And while Juliet gets the ending she always deserved, in real life Merrypor had her fairytale moment before the show had even opened.

“I had never left Australia before,” says Merrypor. “And I got a call one day from work saying that they were going to send me to New York with Casey Donovan [who plays Angelique].”

Hang on, your first trip overseas was with Casey Donovan to watch & Juliet on Broadway?

“Yes, that was my first time out of the country. And they even put us up on a billboard in Times Square and surprised us. I’ve got lots of photos, lots of videos. And I was just sobbing in the middle of Times Square. So I’ll have that video for the rest of my life.”

& Juliet opens at Sydney Lyric Theatre on February 27.

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