In the ways that matter, & Juliet’s title role is one of the hardest in the musical theatre canon. It’s a dance-heavy part – and Jennifer Weber’s hip-hop choreography ain’t easy – and the score, sourced from the catalogue of Swedish pop hitmaker Max Martin, demands that Juliet show off a full two-and-a-bit octaves of vocal range.
The show’s book, too, by Schitt’s Creek’s David West Read, asks the actor playing Juliet to portray everything from suicidality to glittering self-confidence in just a few hours. That’s a difficult enough feat without taking into consideration that & Juliet’s heroine spends a chunk of the show’s runtime suspended in mid-air by a harness, surrounded by confetti cannons, pyrotechnics and white-hot stage lights.
But if anyone can do all that, it’s Vanessa Sears.
Preparing for the role of Juliet has been a full-time job for Sears.
Sears, 32, has had a career that most young performers could only dream of. In 2015, she played Nicola in Mirvish’s Canadian production of Kinky Boots. Less than a decade later, in 2023, she made her Broadway debut as a standby in John Kander and Fred Ebb’s New York, New York. A year after that, she played Juliet in Romeo and Juliet at the Stratford Festival.
And, of course, she’s had a healthy stream of memorable jobs in between the milestones – Alice in Wonderland’s evil queen, King Lear’s ambitious Regan, a few directing gigs – and off the stage, just a few months ago, she married fellow actor Richard Lam.
Sears as Juliet, left, with Jessica B. Hill as Lady Capulet in Rome and Juliet at the Stratford Festival in 2024.David Hou/Stratford Festival/Supplied
Now comes the hardest part: Distilling all that personal, professional and artistic growth into one of the most difficult roles in the canon, in a musical that asks what might happen if Juliet didn’t die at the end of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy.
No pressure.
“This is the biggest thing of my career thus far, which is absolutely wackadoodle,” says Sears on a rare break from rehearsal. “I couldn’t believe that anyone could possibly do this for eight shows a week.”
Preparing for the role has been a full-time job outside the hours spent in the rehearsal hall, she says. When she accepted the job, one of the first things she did was squeeze in a handful of vocal coachings with Matt Farnsworth, the vocal supervisor for & Juliet on Broadway.
“He helped me unlock parts of my voice I’ve struggled to find in the past,” she explains. “Things that once felt really hard and heavy feel easy and sustainable now.”
Julia McLellan, left, George Krissa and Sears rehearse in Toronto on Nov. 17.
While Sears has long been a captivating performer with a reliably impressive voice, Juliet is a mountain that even the most solid vocalists can struggle to scale. The role asks its actor to sing with a punishingly high belt for most of the show – a feat not helped by the fact that a large chunk of & Juliet’s audiences know these songs by heart, chart toppers such as Demi Lovato’s Confident and Britney Spears’s Baby One More Time.
“You can’t belt & Juliet with your chest for eight shows a week,” says Sears. “You can do that for a concert, maybe, but not all the time. I’ve been working for the past few months to find my pop sound, too – I’m such a musical theatre baby, and & Juliet is such a beautiful combination of pop and MT.”
Singing through the show every night would be one thing. But Sears hardly gets a chance to catch her breath as & Juliet wears on – as the musical’s lead, she’s onstage for nearly the whole thing, singing at the top of her lungs and dancing up a considerable sweat as she does it.
“You have to get your cardio up to be able to do this,” she says. “That’s one of the things we’re discovering in the rehearsal hall: Stamina. You have to learn, ‘Oh, I can’t breathe there,’ or ‘Oh, I have to breathe there.’ You figure it out.”
Sears rehearses with associate choreographer Romy Vuksan. & Juliet features difficult hip-hop choreography on top of a demanding vocal performance.
The day I stop by Mirvish’s rehearsal studios to observe Sears in action, she’s working on & Juliet’s climax: Katy Perry’s Roar. The song sees Juliet reclaim her destiny in real time, with lush vocal arrangements that add to the anthem’s feeling of victory. The first time Sears runs the number, something doesn’t go quite right – she’s missed a step, says & Juliet associate choreographer Romy Vuksan.
Immediately, Sears corrects herself, adding a tiny hop in just the right place. In just a second, the number unlocks for her – she gets it right every time after that.
“When they first started teaching us choreo, I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve been miscast,’” jokes Sears. “But it gets easier.”
Ray Hogg, former artistic director of Musical Stage Company in Toronto and resident director of the Canadian production of & Juliet, has known Sears since she was a musical theatre student at Sheridan College. Her rise to fame in Canadian theatre, he says, was all but inevitable.
“I had just been appointed as the artistic director of Rainbow Stage in Winnipeg, and this student walked up to me at her first audition, and said, ‘Hello, my name is Vanessa Sears,’” he recalls. “I was so amazed by this young person, who had so much confidence to walk up like that. It’s not vanity. It’s this great soul, this human who sees other humans without it mattering what your job title is. It’s been wonderful to watch her grow.”
In a way, it feels as though Sears’s artistic journey has made her the only person in Canada who could possibly tackle Juliet: She’s technically played the part already (though Shakespeare’s original is admittedly a far cry from the aged-up, pop-singing diva she’ll portray for the next several months), and her time on stages across Canada and beyond has prepared her for the emotional challenges of diving deep into Western drama’s most famous ingenue night after night.
“Juliet feels really close to me,” she says. “I love that we literally get to rewrite the story to say that Juliet gets to decide what she wants. She gets to have this whole other adventure, a second chance at life. Her life doesn’t have to end with the ending of Shakespeare’s play. It’s a huge lift, a huge sing, but I’m less and less scared every day. I’m more excited than I am scared. It feels like we’re ready for this.”
