When Luke Sheppard signed on five years ago to help bring the songs of Max Martin to the stage he was, he happily confesses, a total novice.

“I’m a musical theatre geek through and through,” the impossibly youthful looking veteran of London’s West End says. “Pop is a new thing for me.”

Working on & Juliet – which meshes Martin’s back catalogue of some of the world’s biggest pop hits with Shakespeare in a story that imagines what might have happened if Juliet had not followed Romeo into oblivion – wasn’t just a job for Sheppard, it was an education.

“I’ve learned a lot about [pop music] during this time and kind of geeked out on it,” he says. And one of the things he learnt is how well the form can (sometimes) work in a narrative context.

“It does feel like these songs were destined to be part of this show. You have Britney Spears in ...Baby One More Time singing ‘my loneliness is killing me’, and then in Stronger she sings ‘my loneliness is killing me no more’, and for someone creating a musical, the dramaturgical potential of that as an arc is really extraordinary.”

Sheppard, American choreographer Jennifer Weber, and Martin, the Swede who has penned more Billboard number one singles than anybody except John Lennon (who is one ahead on 26) and Paul McCartney (way out front with 32) are in Melbourne to see the latest iteration of the show to its official launch on Thursday night. Canadian writer David West Read, who came up with the idea of meshing Martin’s songs with Shakespeare, is not here, but his co-creators can’t sing his praises enough.

It was Martin’s wife who suggested trying to turn 30 years worth of chart-toppers into a one-man jukebox musical, but it was Schitt’s Creek veteran Read who nurtured it towards a coherent whole.

“Going in, I felt like we couldn’t rely on these somewhat famous songs to bear the whole thing,” Martin says. “You needed it to be something where if you hadn’t heard even one song you could come into the theatre and go on a journey.”