NEW YORK — Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is set to make her Broadway debut in the musical comedy “& Juliet” on Saturday, fulfilling a childhood dream of the first Black woman to serve on the nation’s highest court.
The producers of the show announced the cameo appearance on Monday, describing it as a “one-night-only walk-on role” followed by a conversation with the justice after the show. “& Juliet” is a jukebox musical about an alternate version of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” featuring 25 years of pop hits by Swedish hitmaker Max Martin, who produced music for the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Taylor Swift and other pop music giants.
“I, a Miami girl from a modest background with an unabashed love of theater, dreamed of one day ascending to the highest court in the land—and I had said so in one of my supplemental application essays” to Harvard University, Jackson wrote in her memoir “Lovely One,” published earlier this year. “I expressed that I wished to attend Harvard as I believed it might help me ‘to fulfill my fantasy of becoming the first Black, female Supreme Court justice to appear on a Broadway stage.’”
“Let's make that teenage dream come true, Justice Jackson,” the play’s official Instagram account wrote on Monday.
When she kicked off her book tour in September, Jackson did so at New York’s Apollo Theater in Harlem, the site of nine decades of historic performances by Black entertainers. And in a commencement speech at Boston University last year, Jackson said she made her theatrical debut as the Wicked Witch of the West in her elementary school production of “The Wizard of Oz,” cited three other musicals in offering her advice to graduating students, and said that she sought out musical theater in every new city she worked in through her career.
“Let me tell you: I have discovered over the course of my professional career that the arts — and musical theater in particular — can teach valuable lessons about all sorts of things, including how to interact with others, and how to achieve your goals,” she said in the speech.
Her performance in a production of “The Little Shop of Horrors” at Harvard in 1988 was mentioned in a Harvard Crimson review in a section about the production’s flaws.
“Chiffon (Roxanne Lockhart), Crystal (Melanie Sarino) and Ronette (Ketanji Brown), the show's girl group-style Greek chorus, open the show with a rendition of the title song that is more yelled than sung,” the reviewer wrote.
Also at Harvard, Jackson worked as a scene partner in a drama class with future Academy Award-winning actor Matt Damon, the judge told “CBS Sunday Morning” in September. The did a scene from Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”
“And at the end, the professor said, ‘Ketanji, you were very good. Matt, we’ll talk,’” Jackson recalled. “And I was like ‘oh my God, I was better than Matt Damon in a scene.’”
First appointed to a federal judgeship in 2012 by President Barack Obama, Jackson was nominated to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer by President Joe Biden in 2022. She is also the first former public defender to ever serve on the Supreme Court.