Choreographer Jennifer Weber is on a roll.
This is a heady time for Jennifer Weber C’00. “Dance is energy,” Weber says, and her personal style and hip-hop-influenced choreography embody it.
Broadway is just one of her current stomping grounds. Weber’s high-octane, Tony-nominated choreography levitates & Juliet, a jukebox musical remix of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Now in its third year at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, the show has become an international draw, with tours underway in North America as well as the United Kingdom and Ireland, and a production in Hamburg, Germany. The show has also toured Australia and Singapore, and another production is opening in Toronto in December.
& Juliet repurposes the bouncy pop catalog of Swedish songwriter Max Martin (Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone,” the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” Britney Spears’s “…Baby One More Time”). David West Read’s book of the musical embeds the songs in a fable of female empowerment, and Weber’s choreography blends pop, Broadway, and hip-hop moves.
“It’s not in one vocabulary. It’s not in one style. What draws it together is heart,” Weber says. “I love sampling ideas of classic theater, like a little bit of Fosse or a little bit of jazz. Which is also very hip-hop—to sample lots of things the way DJs sample beats and rappers sample lines. It’s part of the culture.”
Martin is a less familiar name than the stars who have propelled his compositions up the pop charts: Spears, Clarkson, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, Pink, and Justin Timberlake, among others. Weber describes Martin’s melodies as the “soundtrack of pop culture” and “the best songs to dance to.”
Luck played a part in Weber’s involvement in & Juliet. One of the show’s producers happened to catch the Off-Broadway production of KPOP, a musical about the Korean pop music industry that Weber had choreographed. (KPOP opened its short Broadway run in November 2022, the same week as & Juliet, earning Weber a burst of headlines and a second Tony nomination.)
Weber was invited to London in the summer of 2018 to choreograph Act I of & Juliet. It was a tryout of sorts. The collaboration, under director Luke Sheppard, meshed and the show was nominated for nine 2020 Olivier Awards, including for Weber’s choreography. (It won three, all for its performers.)
“It’s very ‘old school meets new school,’” Weber says of the dances and design. “I tried to pull a lot of inspiration from classic, old-school hip-hop, stuff that’s not trendy. And for different songs, I was inspired by different types of vocabularies that seemed to match the story. Because when you’re making a musical, it’s not at all about, ‘How cool is the step?’ It’s about, ‘How does this tell the story?’”
In the song “Confident,” Juliet (who, in this version, decides not to kill herself) uses 1970s West Coast hip-hop moves to build up the self-assurance of a new romantic prospect named Frankie. “You see Juliet kind of invent the dance,” Weber says. The ensemble responds. “And then, eventually, Frankie picks up the dance,” and in the process “finds his confidence.”
Weber likens another memorable number, “Problem / Can’t Feel My Face,” to “a classic old-school American musical” dream ballet. Ensemble members, dancing on two rotating turntables, are “embodying the voices in Juliet’s head” and “encouraging her to move forward with a new decision,” Weber explains.
The show’s most iconic number is the climactic “Roar,” in which Juliet finds her voice. Weber demonstrates an arm movement—“there’s no name for it,” she says, “it’s just the ‘Roar’ move”—that has inspired numerous pop-star videos. Katy Perry, who cowrote the song and made it a hit, “came to the show and did this move with the cast” after a performance, Weber says.
Weber’s career got off to an inauspicious start. Despite her youth dance lessons, she was rejected freshman year by every troupe at Penn. “I wouldn’t say I was any good at dancing,” says Weber, who majored in communication. “I was a late bloomer to the world of dance.”
She responded by founding her own group, Strictly Funk—which is still going strong almost 30 years later. “Dance just took over my life,” she says. “It was the best thing about being at Penn.” She had grown to love hip-hop from music videos and nights of club dancing. “I felt like it sat in my body in a way that felt really good—in a way that pirouettes did not feel good,” she says.
Shortly after graduating, she launched a professional troupe, Decadancetheatre, originally entirely female. “My creativity took me in different directions,” she says. “With Deca, we toured a lot, but we were also contestants on a reality TV show.”
The group became known for its hip-hop takes on classical music and ballet, starting with Stravinsky’s The Firebird in 2004. Then came Weber’s reinventions of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and Tchaikovsky’s Christmas Eve ballet, The Nutcracker. “When we did The Nutcracker, it exploded,” Weber says.
Developed in 2013–14, The Hip Hop Nutcracker toured the country, and in 2021 a PBS broadcast of a performance (later streamed on Disney+) won a New York Emmy Award. While You Were Gone, a short dance film that Weber directed and choreographed, won a New England Emmy in 2022. Another milestone, in 2020, was her exuberant choreography for the cheerleaders, zombies, and werewolves in Disney’s Zombies 2 movie.
In 2017, Weber disbanded Decadancetheatre to take advantage of the opportunities coming her way. “I find the artistic process to be the biggest mystery of them all,” she says. “This morning, I was choreographing in my living room in front of my big mirror, making something for tomorrow. There are parts of & Juliet that are exactly what I prepped in front of my mirror by myself. And then there’s numbers that we changed 25 times over the course of building the show.”
Inspiration comes from the music, the story, and sometimes the performers themselves. “It’s really important that everyone feels good doing the movement,” she says. “I never want people to feel like, ‘Oh, I don’t dance like that. That’s not for me.’ I want them to find their own entry point, their own way of tackling steps.”
These days Weber’s slate is crowded. This summer found her in London, choreographing Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical, which combined film and theater. In September comes the debut of a musical stage adaptation of the 2004 romantic film comedy 13 Going On 30. Like & Juliet, it will play at England’s Manchester Opera House. “I’m hoping we can make it two for two in the hit zone,” Weber says.
She also dreams of joining the ranks of Broadway director/choreographers, icons such as Bob Fosse, Susan Stroman, Rob Marshall, and Jerry Mitchell. “I want to give Guys and Dolls the hip-hop reimagination treatment,” Weber says. “I can just picture the crap shooters dance with all B-boys. It’d be amazing.”
—Julia M. Klein
