Jack Antonoff Taylor Hill/FilmMagic
While Romeo + Juliet is one of William Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, Jack Antonoff forgot about that part while creating music for the Broadway revival.
“When I think Romeo + Juliet, and I was doing this in music, I think about hope and love and finding something and running with it against all odds,” Antonoff, 40, said during the Sunday, October 13, episode of CBS Sunday Morning. “I always forget about all the death.”
He added, “So, I started going back and sewing that into the score slightly not knowing this, but hint that it’s gonna be horrible ‘cause I forget!”
The Bleachers musician created an all-new score for Sam Gold’s Broadway production of Romeo + Juliet, which stars Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler as the ill-fated, star-crossed lovers in their respective Great White Way debuts. (For those who, like Antonoff, forgot — teens Romeo and Juliet end up dying by suicide following miscommunication and family feuds that barred them from being together.)
Gold’s production reimagined the classic play by staging it in the round at the Circle in the Square theater in New York City. The cast members also dress in more modern clothes (Connor’s sequined pants will always be famous to Us) and even sing a few songs between monologues.
“[Sam Gold] came to us and he said, ‘It’s a Troye Sivan music video.’ That’s pretty much how he pitched it,” Zegler, 23, said during a September appearance on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “He also said very profound things like, ‘It’s a group of 20something-year-olds who broke into Circle in the Square on Broadway and have to get something off their chest.”
She added, “The play really deals with a lot that somehow relates to a modern audience, even though it was written 500 years ago.”
Connor, 20, further noted during the late-night show that performing Shakespeare is “something that I’ve wanted to do for a while.”
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“I think, as a British actor, a lot of the time, you’re kind of encouraged to do it if you haven’t done it,” the Heartstopper star gushed to host Jimmy Fallon.
It perhaps is expected that Antonoff primarily focused on the romanticism of the Shakespearean play since he’s living a dream world himself. Not only is Antonoff at the top of his game professionally — he produces for the likes of Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter outside of making his own Bleachers records — and he married actress Margaret Qualley last year.
“It continues to be surreal because one of the only promises of the work I do is how fleeting — not the performance, not the audience, but that kind of success is,” Antonoff said on Sunday. “So, there’s never a moment when I’m not, like, amazed by it all.”
