While pop star Katy Perry was late getting onstage Tuesday at Target Center in Minneapolis, only blocks away theatergoers at the more intimate Orpheum Theatre got to hear her pop hit "Roar" well before the concert fans.

The number in "& Juliet" was served up gorgeously by soulful and precise performer Rachel Simone Webb as an anthem of female liberation in a grand, brash Broadway musical that reimagines literary history.

Webb plays the title character in the production, which runs through Sunday. Webb slays, summoning determination and passion on "Roar," the musical's showstopping 11 o'clock number. And her acting is similarly nuanced and affecting as she takes us through the emotional contours of Juliet's maturation.

Like "Six" before it, "Juliet" irreverently and unabashedly remixes history. A jukebox musical staged as an occasional rave by director Luke Sheppard, it uses pop songs, many written or co-written by Swedish hitmaker Max Martin, to send up and re-examine the blindsides and absurdities in Shakespeare's romantic tragedy "Romeo and Juliet."

The show gives voices to figures such as Anne Hathaway (Teal Wicks), Shakespeare's wife, who has her own common sense and equally strong literary imagination. On a stage where they're mounting the original "R&J," Anne constantly tussles with her pun-happy husband (Corey Mach) about the ending and ultimately helps to rewrite a story that the characters, particularly Juliet, get to take over.

The premise of "Juliet," whose clever book was crafted by "Schitt's Creek" writer David West Read, asks what if Juliet didn't kill herself alongside doomed beau Romeo but instead fled to Paris with her nurse, who now has the name Angelique (Kathryn Allison) and new friends, including the nonbinary May (Nick Drake).

Matthew Murphy
Rachel Simone Webb and Mateus Leite Cardoso perform in "& Juliet."

And with her new lease on life, what would Juliet want to do? Well, she was 13 in Shakespeare's original, so she would want to grow up, see the world and, yes, par-tay.

"Juliet" is a lot of wicked fun, a joy that derives from the recontextualized and reorchestrated pop numbers made famous by the likes of Ke$ha ("Blow"), Jessie J ("Domino") and Britney Spears ("Baby One More Time" and "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman," here given a haunting rendition by Drake).

Sometimes the pleasure comes from disjuncture as the show mashes up eras. For example, the first time we hear Shakespeare and Anne sing the Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way" — Mach and Wicks are excellent in their roles — you shake your head in both delight and disbelief. For we're watching the greatest writer in English mouthing a 20th-century Martin song with a much easier rhyme scheme but also with boy band lead singer swagger.

And, in fact, there's a glitzy and big boy band surprise in "Juliet" as well.

Some of the songs in "Juliet" fit perfectly. But for others, you can see how the story is being shaped to get to a musical number.

No matter. The cast is almost universally strong, with Allison delivering a reassuring ("[Expletive] Perfect"), Paul-Jordan Jensen as persnickety French gentleman Lance, Mateus Leite Cardoso as his shy son Francois, and Daniel J. Maldonado adding sweetness to otherwise dumb douchebag Romeo.

But it is Webb who shows Shakespeare's purportedly doomed romantic heroine as a survivor who's totally feeling herself in "Juliet," and yes, we're all here for it.

'& Juliet'

When: 7:30 p.m. Wed.-Fri., 2 & 7:30 p.m. Sat., 1 & 6:30 p.m. Sun.

Where: Orpheum Theatre, 910 Hennepin Av. S., Mpls.

Tickets: $65-$418. hennepinarts.org.