& Juliet, the smash Broadway musical, is coming to Cleveland’s Connor Palace Theatre from March 4 through March 23! {Details and tickets}
The show is helmed by writer David West Read (Schitt’s Creek) and features the music of the top pop music writer of this generation (perhaps of all time?) Mr. Max Martin, who has penned or co-written songs for the likes of Taylor Swift, Backstreet Boys, Kesha, and P!nk (to name a few). He is credited with 27 #1 hits. (And, of course, & Juliet would never exist without the OG Romeo & Juliet story by William Shakespeare!)
CleveRock had the opportunity to check in with performer (and Baldwin Wallace University graduate) Mateus Leite Cardoso, who plays Francois in the show, ahead of the show’s run in Cleveland.
{His busy schedule only allowed us a small window to chat!}
The story of Romeo & Juliet is timeless and is still relevant for literally hundreds of years after it was written! & Juliet is a new tale, and MLC was asked to give readers a synopsis of the show.
“We basically follow Juliet as she makes the decision to continue living after Romeo has decided to stab himself, or maybe he poisons himself. I can’t really remember at this point,” he said with a laugh. “There’s a lot of stabbing; a lot of poisoning there. But she decides to continue living her life after Romeo, and she leaves her home, she goes to France, and she meets some new people who are going to, I guess, she’s going to influence them. They’re going to influence her, and she’s going to learn how to live her own life; not being dictated by what the men in her life tell her what to do.”
Mateus is excited to be bringing the show to Cleveland, and there is one part of the show in particular that he is most excited to share with the audience.
“One of my favorite moments is when Juliet starts to have another relationship after Romeo, and things kind of move a little too fast. It quickly transitions to her singing, ‘Oops … I did it again.’ And that’s one of my favorite moments of the show,” he said.
Of course, the show is driven by the story of David West Read and the instantly recognizable hits from Max Martin. Mateus was asked, aside from the music and story, a key element that audience members should be on the lookout for.
“There’s a really clever device that our director and the writers of the show have introduced, which is this quill,” he said. “So Shakespeare’s quill (Shakespeare is a character in our show), and he’s kind of presenting Romeo & Juliet, and his wife tells the audience, ‘Oh, well, should we really make Juliette kill herself? I don’t think we should do that.’ And so, there’s kind of this whole aspect of the quill being passed between Shakespeare and his wife and them writing the story together. That’s something that I’m not quite sure a ton of people notice, but depending on who is holding the quill in the scene, it’s either written by Shakespeare or written by his wife. And it’s interesting to see what the different scenes are and how those play out.”
Baldwin Wallace University, Mateus’ alma mater, is one of the top Musical Theater programs in the country. Of course, Playhouse Square is second only to Broadway as the largest theater district in the United States. Mateus was asked to talk about the opportunities afforded him in Northeast Ohio.
“I feel like that was a pretty great stomping grounds for new up-and-coming musical theater artists,” he said. “I got a chance to work at Playhouse Square with Great Lakes Theater. I did some shows there. I got the chance to understudy some people and the chance to be in the onstage company of A Christmas Carol. All of those experiences really helped me understand what it’s like to operate under a professional space before I graduated and was able to get in the room to do bigger auditions for this, for national tours for Broadway, and stuff like that. It was a great place to workshop how to act in those sense of spaces.
Without a doubt, Mateus will be one of the tour guides showing his cast around this great city.
“I kind of am. I love Cleveland,” he said. “I really enjoyed going to school there. I think partially because I’m from Florida, but I’m super excited to show people around. I love all the suburbs of Cleveland, like Lakewood. I love Westlake. I love Crocker Park.”
And, is there a specific place that Mateus is itching to take his fellow cast members to?
“Hecks Cafe!” He said without hesitation. “It’s in Tremont. I can’t wait.”
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