BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Romeo, devastated and robbed, stared over Juliet’s lifeless body, lying atop a table in a rehearsal studio at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts here. But instead of saying goodbye before taking his own life, Romeo broke down into song in this adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, the lyrics familiar to any rock music fan growing up in the 1980s.
We belong to the light
We belong to the thunder
We belong to the sound of the words
We both fell under it.
Sitting behind a table observing this first full rehearsal, Pat Benatar, who was singing “We Belong”—a touchstone of the MTV era that reached No. 5 on the Billboard chart in 1984—stopped taking notes and began to to cry. When the run-through ended, Benatar turned to her husband and musical partner, Neil Giraldo. “Excuse me,” she said, “I have to go fix my mascara.”
The story of “Romeo and Juliet” has been presented in countless ways over the years, most recently as the jukebox musical “& Juliet,” of Max Martin songs, which opened on Broadway this month. The Benatar-Giraldo version, “Invincible – the musical,” is five years in the making, the result of a circuitous route that includes two competing ideas for a Benatar-inspired stage play, a cease and desist order and a reconciliation that brokered an alliance between a TV showrunner playwright and the singer he idolized as a boy growing up in Southern California.
Bradley Bredeweg, creator and showrunner of “The foster parents”, wrote the book for “Invincible,” fusing Benatar and Shakespeare, using 1980s rock anthems to drive the narrative of a story written in the 16th century. In previews now in the Valais, it is scheduled to open December 2 and run through December 18.
Even reimagining the play, the tragic story of these two young lovers is touching as ever, so it was no surprise that Benatar started crying. But it was more than the tragedy of their story; she had just watched, often singing along with the words, at a celebration of the careers she and her husband have built over the decades in arenas and concert halls, sung by actors not even born when their first big hit, “Heartbreaker,” reached the top of the charts.
“You have to understand,” said Benatar, 69, as she headed to a rehearsal on Sunday morning. “I am the only person who has sung these songs for 43 years. I can’t get my head around it.”
“I didn’t think I’d live past 45,” she said, commenting on the rock and roll lifestyle, “so I’m pretty happy to be here.”
That said, the opening of “& Juliet” in New York makes for an unfortunate coincidence of timing for Benatar, Giraldo and Bredeweg, who hope their show will also go to Broadway — not that they’re worried about the arrival of the competition at the Stephen Sondheim Theater after a successful run on London’s West End. “This is not a jukebox musical,” 66-year-old Giraldo said of their version, which contains 28 Benatar tracks. ‘Wouldn’t. This isn’t ‘Jersey Girls’.”
It almost didn’t happen. The 46-year-old Bredeweg, who in his youth was surrounded by Benatar music at home, in the car and in shopping malls, came up with the idea when he drove from Los Angeles to San Francisco. He had just reread “Romeo and Juliet” and put a Benatar greatest hits album in the CD player.
“One song after another, they just kept coming – ‘Heartbreaker’, ‘We live for love’he said. “I started to realize that they are all songs – if you put them in the perfect order, they correspond to the piece we all know. These songs were almost written for this beloved story.”
“That night I get to my cousin’s house and I said I need an hour before dinner, and locked myself in a room and came up with the first sketch of what ‘Invincible’ would become.”
After writing the musical, Bredeweg convinced the Rockwell table and stage, a theater in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles that has since closed, to allow him to perform it there. The early version, known as “Love Is a Battlefield”, ran for six months and sold out on many nights.
Unbeknownst to Bredeweg, Benatar and Giraldo were in New York working on their own show, using their songs to tell the story of the challenges faced by musicians romantically involved and confronting the music industry. “For years people kept saying, ‘You should do a story about your life. People don’t know the professional side, they don’t know how the secret partnership works,” Giraldo said. “It’s not all wine and roses.”
They got wind of Bredeweg’s show and sent their manager to see it – and soon realized the implications of the conflict. “We have sent a cease and desist letter,” said Benatar. “He didn’t have permission. We felt, ‘Let’s stop this now.’ We felt really bad, but we had to do it.”
Bredeweg was floored. “It was the scariest letter I’ve ever seen,” he said. “We’ve shut it down.”
As time went on, Benatar and Giraldo became increasingly skeptical about the prospect of building a jukebox show based on their own lives. “Like them or not, these shows are not timeless: they have an expiration date,” said Benatar, who was inducted this year into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “You get to a point where you’re fed up with yourself.”
Intrigued by what they had heard about the Los Angeles show, they asked Bredeweg to come east and talk about a possible collaboration. He joined them in their tour bus passing through Connecticut.
“When I heard our songs lined up to tell the story of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ lyrically, I thought, ‘Now, wait a minute: That sounds like a damn good idea,'” Benatar said. “Especially when he showed me how to use ‘We Live for Love’ for the balcony scene.”
“He’s such a generous man,” she said. “Even though we stopped his production, he was such a generous man.”
The concept of a Benatar-Shakespeare mash-up is certainly adventurous and got some people thinking – including the woman who now directs the show. “When I first came by I thought, who knows? This is such a wild card — it might work, it might not,” said Tiffany Nichole Greene, the director. “I thought, if we agree, fine; if not, I’ll meet Pat Benatar.”
The more Bredeweg researched the careers of Benatar and Giraldo, the more convinced he became that he could put their music at the service of his playing, without it having the forced feel of a jukebox musical – thanks in no small part to the two musicians themselves. “Everyone always said they were considered the Romeo and Juliet of the rock ‘n’ roll industry,” he said of the couple. “Everyone was trying to break them apart every step of the way.”
The show is also an unusual production for a theater like the Wallis, more known for stage plays and classical music, and reflects the theater’s struggles as it rebuilds an audience after pandemic losses. Coy Middlebrook, the acting chief artistic officer, said de Wallis hoped new audiences would be drawn in by the promise of an innovative production powered by the music of two well-known rock celebrities.
“A lot of our music to date has been classic programming,” said Middlebrook. “This was an opportunity for us to get into the pop-rock genre. We’re all still coming back and building back. It is a challenge. We knew this could be an opportunity to get people out of their homes.”
Benatar and Giraldo attended every rehearsal, sat with Bredeweg and discussed adjustments and changes between breaks. Although based on ‘Romeo and Juliet’, this play is largely told in modern English. The story has some twists and turns about what Shakespeare wrote; thus, in this version, the matriarchs of the Capulets and Montagues are central.
Be that as it may, the question remains: Is Broadway hungry for two jukebox musicals based on “Romeo and Juliet”?
“The only thing that has to do with this being a jukebox musical is that these songs were ever played on a jukebox,” said Benatar. “I love that it duels with ‘Romeo and Juliet’. It is awesome.”