Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson ditched the bench for the Broadway stage on Saturday night, making her debut on the Great White Way in the musical & Juliet.
The star-turn was apparently the fulfillment of a life-long dream for the jurist, who infamously said she could not define what a woman is because she is “not a biologist” at her Senate confirmation hearings. But her participation has come under scrutiny given the subject matter of the show, which is a ‘woke’ reimagining of William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.
On Wednesday’s show, Megyn was joined by Adam Carolla, host of The Adam Carolla Show, to discuss Jackson’s appearance and what has happened to Broadway.
Jackson’s Appearance
Jackson made a one-night-only appearance in & Juliet at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in New York City on Saturday as Queen Mab, a walk-on role written specifically for her. The evening performance, which marked the first time a Supreme Court justice has appeared on Broadway, also included a “talkback” after the show.
& Juliet first announced its guest star on social media on December 9, saying it was excited to make Jackson’s “teenage dream come true” (a nod to the Katy Perry hit that features in the show). In her new memoir, Jackson talked about her desire to be both on the Supreme Court and on Broadway.
“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],” she wrote. “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.’”
Her wish was granted on Saturday when she took to the stage in Elizabethan-inspired garb to excitedly exclaim, “Female empowerment, sick!” In another scene, she was part of an ensemble that performed the Backstreet Boys’ “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely,” which the show shared a clip of on Instagram:
The & Juliet Plot
On the production poster, Jackson’s Queen Mab was reportedly described as a “she/her” character. The inclusion of preferred pronouns is in keeping with the musical’s woke and queer plot that Megyn spoke about back in February on The Megyn Kelly Show after her then-12-year-old daughter went to see it with friends.
As Megyn shared at the time, she looked into the show before agreeing to let her daughter go and the marketing materials at the time seemed pretty benign (you can read Megyn’s full recap here). Needless to say, she was confused when her daughter came home and shared that there are trans themes in the plot that also includes gender fluid characters and proudly “celebrates queer love.”
The Reaction
While Jackson’s appearance was widely applauded by the media and theater community, Carolla speculated the same would not be true if, say, Justice Clarence Thomas guest starred in a production with more conservative themes. “If there was a right-wing justice doing some old play… that was gun-centric and male-centric, they would get slammed,” he said. “So, they wouldn’t do it. They would say, ‘I’m on the Supreme Court… I don’t like the optics of it. I’m not going to do it.'”
He said people on the left don’t have to have those concerns. “People on the left do not care [about the optics],” Carolla said. “The left is able and feels fine wearing their politics and their culture sort of on their sleeve.”
While Broadway has always been left of center, Carolla said it now goes beyond that. “I think Broadway is really the epicenter, the nougat inside the candy bar of the progressive movement,” he explained. “You can say college campuses, college faculty, Hollywood, and things like that, but Broadway is probably the purest, uncut, un-stepped on progressivism on the planet.”
Megyn agreed. “Going to Broadway when I was younger, it wasn’t like this… [But] every other role is a trans role now – far more representative than is in society,” she noted. “And it is to the point where it is fine for a Supreme Court justice – the same person who couldn’t tell us what a woman is – to appear in a show like that.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Carolla by tuning in to episode 968 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.