When David West Read was in his early 20s he moved from his home in suburban Toronto to New York City, to pursue what he hoped would be a long career in writing. He enrolled at the Juilliard school of performing arts as a “TV concentrate” but surprised himself in the first few weeks of his studies by “crossing the floor into the playwriting department”. Despite the fact that his initial creative instincts were televisual, living in New York he had fallen in love at first sight with the theatre.
“Growing up in Toronto,” West Read explains from a desk in his Los Angeles office, where he is running a writer’s room for a new Apple TV+ drama starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, “I hadn’t really seen any live theatre before.” But in New York, “instantly, there were so many opportunities. There were free tickets, there were jobs and perks for [theatre students], and I took every single one of them. I must have seen hundreds of performances,” he says of that heady time, “and I really came to appreciate what is so special about live performance.”
West Read’s first professional opportunity came soon after graduation. He credits his playwriting teacher, Daniel Goldfarb, for his big break. “I volunteered as assistant on his plays,” he says, “helping him with rewrites, sitting in on rehearsals, and he had such a passion for theatre that it seemed like a pretty great career.”
When West Read presented him with the draft of a script he had been working on, Goldfarb introduced him to his agent, and the young writer’s debut play, The Dream of the Burning Boy, was produced at the Roundabout Theatre in 2011. Off the back of that success, Broadway came calling, and the following year The Performers debuted at the Longacre Theatre in a starry production featuring Henry Winkler and Alicia Silverstone.
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The celebrity casting couldn’t save the production from the ruthless reality of lukewarm reviews, and it closed less than a week after opening night. West Read’s star had risen and fallen in a year, and he was heartbroken. “I was very aware of how fortunate I was and I got completely swept up in the excitement of it all. Then to crash down so quickly, and in such a public way, I really struggled. People in the theatre world backed away from me. They didn’t want to be associated with this flop.” West Read himself “didn’t want to be associated with the theatre any more”.
But his luck soon changed: when he submitted a sample to the makers of a new Canadian sitcom that was looking for writers, he landed a junior role – and soon worked his way up to executive producer. The sitcom was Schitt’s Creek, starring Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, and it ran for six seasons. Its final season broke records when it won seven Emmy Awards, taking top spot in every category for comedy drama, including an Emmy for West Read himself.
Despite his success in TV, which also includes two seasons of The Big Door Prize, starring Chris O’Dowd, West Read says live theatre remains his true passion. So when he was approached to write a musical for Max Martin, the Swedish songwriter and producer behind hits by many of the biggest pop stars of the past 25 years, including Britney Spears, the Weeknd and Taylor Swift, he tried to forget about his Broadway bruises and pitched an outlandish rewrite of Romeo and Juliet in which the heroine decides to forgo suicide for adventure, heading to Paris after Romeo’s death in the hope of finding new love.
West Read had known almost nothing about Martin or the artists he worked with, but once he started researching which of Martin’s songs would suit the jukebox musical he quickly realised it was impossible not to know Martin’s music. “It is everywhere you go, especially in America.” But Martin was far from a household name. What the project needed, West Read decided, was a recognisable figure, someone who “could be a poster person for the show. I also thought it would be really fun to reinvent a classic story at the same time. To shake up perceptions of something canonical as well as the perception of the songs.” The seeds for & Juliet were sown.
Set in the immediate aftermath of Shakespeare’s most iconic tragedy, & Juliet is actually more than a reimagination of the classic heroine’s fate. It is set in a very contemporary-looking Elizabethan England and places Shakespeare himself front and centre. Struggling to finish his new play about the young star-cross’d lovers, Will, as he is known in West Read’s drama, is also struggling with marriage problems of his own. His wife, Anne, sick of playing second fiddle to his ambition, thinks she might know a bit more about the challenges of a relationship and is determined to put her tuppence into the unfolding play.
While the story West Read sketched out for the producers wasn’t a hard sell – “they took to it immediately” – the writer himself was a bit unsure about how it might translate for a mainstream-musical audience. In North America, he says “Shakespeare is something you learn in school. It’s considered highbrow and inaccessible, so the challenge for me was to demonstrate how Shakespeare was the pop artist of his day, because he really was ... He wasn’t writing just for the elite or the educated class but for everyone.” And theatre, like pop, is a hugely collaborative medium, West Read adds.
& Juliet opened on Broadway in 2022 after a stunning few years wowing critics and audiences in England. (The production won three Olivier Awards, including best actress in a musical for the first Juliet, Miriam Teak-Lee.) The cross-generational musical offers three love stories unfolding in parallel: Juliet’s opportunistic pining is set against Will and Anne’s middle-aged marital crisis, while Juliet’s nurse is given a late-in-life opportunity for romance when, following Juliet across continents as her protector, she reunites with an old lover in France. The love stories coalesce at Romeo’s funeral to a rendition of Backstreet Boys’ Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely. (Yes, really.)
West Read also gives Shakespeare’s standard comic gender-bending trope a distinct contemporary flavour, in the shape of Juliet’s best friend, the nonbinary Mai, who, in a stunning solo, brings poignant meaning to Britney Spears’s I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman. It may sound cliched, but when you see it on stage it feels organic and authentically representative.
In a coincidence worthy of a Shakespearean comedy, when the North American production was first announced, West Read was told that the previews would take place in his old stamping ground of Toronto. Midway through dress rehearsals, one of the cast caught Covid-19, and West Read found himself corralled into their place for the opening performance.
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“Thankfully, there was very little singing – and I turned down the mic a lot – but it was absolutely terrifying,” he says. “It was the first time I had been on stage since college, and it definitely gave me deeper appreciation for what actors have to do every night.”
If he ever had to step into an actor’s shoes again for the show, West Read says, he would hope to play Will. “Anne is the best character, I think,” he says, the wounding memories of his early Broadway failure firmly banished. “The metatheatrical aspect of a writer playing a writer would be too good to resist.”
& Juliet is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, from Tuesday, February 25th, to Saturday, March 8th
