This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:01] Jerry Mitchell: Welcome to the & Juliet Podcast. Today, Jerry Mitchell and & Juliet choreographer Jennifer Weber talk about the power of dance in storytelling.

[0:10] Jennifer Weber: Hit me, baby, one more time. Let's talk about your show.

[0:16] Jerry Mitchell: Anytime, anytime. & Juliet. I saw the show prior to the pandemic here in the UK. I was just, I was blown away. I loved everything about the show. I came out of the theater, I took a picture of the marquee at the Shaftesbury Theatre, and I made a post and I said, get ready, world, because this show is going to roar across all seven continents. It's called & Juliet, and it's coming for you, and it is full out. And so, congratulations. Tell me about your experience making this incredible musical.

[0:52] Jennifer Weber: Thank you. I mean, yeah, it has been, to be honest, like the absolute best experience of any creative process, because this is like my dream show. You know, this is like a show that has so much choreography, so much storytelling, so much positivity, so much energy, so much love. And like all that started in the creative team and then just continued on stage.

[1:19] Jerry Mitchell: Was this your first Broadway show? Is this your Broadway debut?

[1:22] Jennifer Weber: Yeah, this is my Broadway debut.

[1:24] Jerry Mitchell: What a show to make a Broadway debut with. Congratulations on that, too.

[1:29] Jennifer Weber: Thank you. Yeah, I never, you know, like, because I sort of started as a choreographer, I was not a dancer first, so I didn't have like a dance career. I didn't have a career as like an assistant who became an associate, so I just sort of started. Like me, I had to work my ass up 17 years to get to Broadway, and you just bust the doors down with & Juliet.

[1:52] Jennifer Weber: I mean, I definitely worked on all different things to like lead myself to this point. But like, you know, to just sort of get thrown into the world of Broadway with such a massive show, it's just like, wow, like so much to learn.

[2:05] Jerry Mitchell: Well, tell me a little bit about your personal style.

[2:09] Jennifer Weber: I think I know what it is, but tell me what you think your personal style is.

[2:13] Jennifer Weber: I mean, when people ask me, like, what is my personal style? Like, I always think of myself as a storyteller and like I think of storytelling as my style, you know, that I sort of, you know, look at what is needed for this moment, for this character, for this group. What can we do to empower the cast to tell the story? And that's sort of where I sort of start. Everything is from that place of like, how do I empower people to feel amazing, to be able to communicate what we want them to communicate in this moment?

[2:50] Jerry Mitchell: Okay, so I as a choreographer watching your work, when I look at & Juliet, I feel it is extremely well based in a hip hop style. Right. I mean, Broadway, hip hop, your style, hip hop, whatever you want to call it. It's certainly got a more modern take and a more hip hop style than most Broadway shows you see. So just thinking of that, did that come to you because of the music? How did you get your vocabulary of steps in which you were going to tell your story?

[3:22] Jennifer Weber: I mean, you know, my background as a dancer and as a choreographer was really coming from hip hop. And I think there's like such an interesting sort of like parallel in hip hop and in theater, because like hip hop really comes from the people. And as a movement of communication and character, if you think about like the roots of hip hop in the beginning and this vocabulary that people were using to give themselves a voice. And this idea that no one wanted to do the exact same move that somebody else wanted to do. They always wanted to top each other and create their own moves and like be the person who like, you know, was the spark of this whole thing.

[4:08] Jerry Mitchell: Well, you just start the show with that exact idea, because now I've seen the show a couple of times and it never starts the same way because there's a different actor who takes the front and center and does a different move because they're telling their version of the story, their version of hip hop. And you watch all of these different people and it's always like, what are they going to do? Oh, my God, that dancer is amazing. That dancer is amazing. You're allowing them to express themselves individually, which I also love in any musical.

[4:41] Jennifer Weber: Absolutely. And like, you know, I think that's what's so exciting is like when you have a cast that has such a range of movement styles within them. Right. We have some people who are super hip hop. We have some people who are super musical theater. And it's like I want to celebrate all of that in the show. You know, I don't want everyone to do every move exactly the same way with, you know, I want people to bring their own story to it because that's what this show is about. Right. This show is about a company of players telling this story and each player has their own perspective on everything that's happening on the stage. And, you know, also each player has all their own like movement style that they're like putting on top of everything that I'm giving them movement wise.

And that's what's so magical is that like because what they're giving to each person is authentic to that person that I think that that's what makes the energy just explode. It's like no one's trying to be someone else. You definitely embrace that with your choreography and also with your casting of the show, because I've seen it now with a couple of different casts. And, you know, it's so individual.

[5:45] Jerry Mitchell: So I'm going to ask you a question that I get asked as a choreographer all the time. And I always have a terrible answer for it, but I'm going to see what you have to say in the show. & Juliet, tell me what was your favorite number to choreograph?

[6:03] Jennifer Weber: There is something that I feel about "Roar" that is so unique. And it's something that like I remember the very first day when I was choreographing "Roar" and I was I had an amazing skeleton crew in New York of some of my best, best, best friends who are helping me out. And we just started like with this movement that's like it's not really a move. It's more like a feeling. And it just started building. And it's like the way that that movement feels and the way that movement then generated the entire number of "Roar" and where that number sort of like sits in the show. And then the way that the cast feels while doing "Roar," like it makes me so emotional just like thinking about it, because it's like it's all about finding your own strength and finding your own voice, because that's what happens in that moment in the show.

Juliet is really like she's telling Shakespeare, I'm not done. I've got more to say and I'm going to say it myself. And this is how I'm going to say it. And then we explode that feeling from literally from Juliet into a diamond that explodes with more and more and more people building. And then the whole stage is like we just take over and you really feel the individuality of each of the players and how they connect to Juliet and how they have their own story.

[7:29] Jerry Mitchell: Okay, Jen, in "Roar," I remember specifically watching one beat of your choreography and it reminded me of something that I tried to accomplish with "You Can't Stop the Beat" and "Hairspray." I tried to make the steps simplistic enough that anyone in the audience, my grandmother, could come to the show and think, I can do those steps and start joining in. I'm moving my hands back and forth and I'm on a diagonal and it started with one person and then it was two and it built into this power wedge that just you couldn't ignore it. Everybody could do it and you built it like that. So it made us in the audience believe we could do it too. Was that your intention?

[8:21] Jennifer Weber: That was 100 percent my intention. It's kind of funny because this idea of, you know, I call it a point dance because that's what it's called in K-pop. And K-pop is sort of known for creating these point dances, these sort of dances that everyone in the audience, all the fans, the super fans of the different boy bands and girl bands. They learn these dances. They create videos of these dances. They post the videos. It sort of becomes this like culture of a way of sort of like communicating between like the K-pop group and like their fans is like through choreography. So having spent a ton of time researching and studying K-pop, you know, this was one of my takeaways that I thought would be so successful in this particular moment with "Roar" and with this very simple sort of gestural choreography that the whole audience could pick up on.

Because there's something, you know, in the same way that the K-pop fans want to feel like connected to their favorite idol group. I felt the audience wanted to feel this connection to Juliet and the players and the way to bridge that gap was through this movement.

[9:34] Jennifer Weber: It gives everybody in the audience that emotion. It really, it just washes over the audience. I always say it's like a tsunami of love. You send it out and everybody gets it.

[9:43] Jerry Mitchell: Here's another question for you because I think you did this in such a brilliant way in the show. Both times I've seen the show here in the UK and in America is principals who have to dance, who aren't necessarily dancers. And that is a really, people forget that choreographers, it's easy to choreograph on a dancer who can do your steps. But your job also is to make the principals look like they know what they're doing. And a great choreographer, Michael Bennett, once said to me, if they don't look good, you don't look good. So you better change your step. So my question for you is as you were originally creating it here in London, did you take that into account for each principal? Did you craft the steps to fit the person, the actor who had to play the part that must have been part of your process?

[10:38] Jennifer Weber: Absolutely. And to be honest, it's one of the parts of the process I like the most. I find that collaboration working with the principals one-on-one to just be so interesting because they think differently than we think about choreography. They think about the movements in a different way and sometimes they're kind of nervous about it. The amount of times I've had people come up to me and be like, I'm not a dancer. And I'm like, well, you're in a musical, so you're going to be dancing. But I love that. And I love working with them and cracking it open for them and having them find their voice and their character's voice. And I think in & Juliet, especially with the boy band number and having all those principals who are in the boy band, that is a lot of choreo.

What I loved about what I saw in your work was I saw actors dancing. And that was another great thing, great lesson that I learned from Jerome Robbins. He said, I would rather watch an actor dance than a dancer try to act. And what he meant was, it's all story.

[12:00] Jerry Mitchell: And that's, that's, you know, so cool about making theater is that you do get to keep growing and you get to keep learning and you get to keep seeing it fresh, you know, because you're bringing a whole new fresh group of humans together.

[20:05] Jennifer Weber: One last question I have for you. The work that you did is so spectacular. And it's so powerful, powerful movement. And how was it to create it and yet become such a huge success during this crazy time we've all been through in this pandemic?

[20:29] Jennifer Weber: For you as a choreographer, as I've experienced, having to make sure you've got backups waiting off stage who can come on and deliver exactly like the people who are on stage and even more than usual now, because of the COVID stuff. We used to have two swings, maybe four. Now we've got eight. And they all have to be trained and they all have to be ready to go into all the roles. I mean, you know, we are so lucky to have such an incredible group of swings, of dance captains, of associates, you know, it takes a village. And I think, you know, I'm so grateful to the swings in our company and our dance captains, like they work so hard. And they're such unicorns. They're just magical unicorns who can do all these things.

[21:20] Jennifer Weber: And something I think is really exciting about Juliet is, you know, all of our swings, they have character names, they have their own costumes. They have certain moments that they do when they're on. They do their version of that moment. So I was able to choreograph multiple versions of that opening solo because the swings have their own version of that solo, you know, because it's not about everyone doing it the same. Like I said, it's about everyone doing it their own way. And I think our show really, really celebrates those people. I certainly celebrate those people. But I think as a show, as a company, we really celebrate those people because theater would be nothing without them.

[22:04] Jennifer Weber: And when you find those people, it's like you just have to hold on to them and make them know how special they really are. Because, you know, sometimes I think it's hard for them because they don't always get to do, you know, all the big press hits or, you know, they might not be on stage on opening night. And I think that's it's really hard. But, you know, we brought all of our swings out on opening, you know, to join in, in Kiss Up the Feeling and to celebrate them.

[22:33] Jerry Mitchell: Well, it really shows the energy. The energy the other night when I went to see the show in New York was, you know, off the charts. The cast was having a ball and you feel that in the audience. And so congratulations on a huge success. Wishing you continued success and a fabulous spring season in New York and beyond. And it's lovely to meet you and chat about choreography.

[22:55] Jennifer Weber: Absolutely. My favorite topic. It's so great. It's so great to get to talk to you. I mean, I've watched your work for quite a bit of time and it's just, I mean, just it's so impressive. All like the amazing shows you've made and the amazing work you've created and your ability to, you know, have gone through being a dancer to associate to choreographer to director, director, choreographer. Like, it's just it's so inspiring because that's, you know, something I hope that I could that I could have that kind of that kind of career as you are.

[23:32] Jerry Mitchell: You are well on your way. Well, on your way. Thank you so much.

[23:41] Jennifer Weber: Thank you for listening to the & Juliet podcast. Join us next time when Kenny Leon talks to & Juliet director Luke Shepard.