In Mirvish’s ‘& Juliet,’ Vanessa Sears takes on a character she knows well — and turns it on its head

Playing two students — one an ostracized Black girl in the 1940s, the other a fierce contemporary rapper — Sears easily stood out. Great presence and singing voice. Focused acting. Undeniable talent. I’ll never forget one scene, in which the two of us were alone in a room, and her cocky, uniformed high school student challenged me to a sit-up competition. She trounced me.

Since then, she’s flexed her muscles doing big musicals — including Mirvish’s “Kinky Boots” right after graduation — and medium-sized ones (“Caroline, or Change,” “Passing Strange”), both the Shaw and Stratford festivals and straight plays. In 2023, she made her Broadway debut in the new Kander & Ebb stage musical “New York, New York.”

And now she’s playing the title role in “& Juliet,” the all-Canadian production of the blockbuster show that uses Max Martin songs and a book by “Schitt’s Creek” writer David West Read to tell the story of Shakespeare’s Juliet if she had chosen to live her best life rather than kill herself over Romeo.

“It feels like this show was tailor made for me,” said Sears recently during a rehearsal lunch break. “It’s so silly, yet so powerful. It has this happy, poppy, glittery score, and yet at times is so poignant and moving. Juliet’s struggle is palpable.”

Sears, who grew up in the small town of Deep River, Ont., is in the unique position of playing this more contemporary version of Juliet a year after starring in “Romeo and Juliet” at the Stratford Festival.

“I still have a sense memory of playing that role,” she said. “There are scenes in the musical with the Capulets — Juliet’s mom and dad — where I remember how distraught Juliet was in the play. I think that grounds me in a way that is useful and makes the stakes real. It also feels wonderful to get another shot at playing her.

“When ‘Romeo and Juliet’ ended, a part of me was hoping I’d get to do the role again, with all the things I’d learned. And now I get to play her in a different way — one that’s more like me, someone who has more agency than she did in the play.”

If the OG Juliet’s love life ended in tragedy, Sears is blissfully happy and in love. She and actor/musician Richard Lam married in late August. They met in the spring of 2021, when she was cast as the Red Queen in Bad Hats Theatre’s marvellous musical adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland,” and Lam played multiple parts, including a Dodo bird.

The two immediately hit it off and spent so much time together that the stage manager had to keep reminding them to stay masked and six feet apart. (This was during COVID-19 pandemic.) After the show, they began dating, went Instagram official while getting their COVID vaccines and have shared relationship updates over the past several years, even when work has separated them geographically.

When Sears was cast as the standby for the lead role in the Broadway musical “New York, New York,” Lam, a Shaw Festival regular, visited her several times. He even made it to her Broadway debut, with 12 hours’ notice, which involved travelling from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Toronto, getting the first flight to Newark, seeing the show and spending 10 minutes at the stage door before hightailing it back to the airport and the Shaw Festival.

“I remember worrying that New York was going to be a challenge for us, because we’d never done the long-distance thing like that before,” said Sears. “Richard told me that I had to do it, that there was no question.”

While in New York, she made lots of connections, including “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote new songs for the show, and the legendary composer John Kander. Both signed letters for her visa application.

Lam, in a separate interview, said Sears has a grounded, dignified power onstage.

“There’s a real sense of class to everything she does,” he said. “I thought that she was going to be this diva in person, so I was surprised to find that she’s bubbly, goofy and quite silly in real life. She constantly sings around the house, making up little songs describing what she’s doing and what I’m doing.”

Over the past few years, audiences have got to see different sides of the actor, too.

During the pandemic, besides pivoting to TV — she starred in the Hallmark movie “14 Love Letters” — Sears decided to begin acting in plays as well as musicals. This led to some of her best work.

She played a disfigured sister seeking vengeance on her father in “Is God Is”; she presented contrasting takes on the role of Regan in “King Lear” and “Queen Goneril”; and last season she earned a Dora nomination (her seventh in seven years) for the challenging role of a Black woman experiencing microaggressions in her office in the solo drama “Shedding a Skin.”

“I was starting to feel a bit ingenue’d out,” Sears said, laughing, about the move to straight plays.

“I wanted to take a break from musicals to see if I could do other things. The roles I got were so different from how people viewed me. I think I always knew I had that inside me and I wanted to share that. So it was cool to have my feelings affirmed.”

But now she’s thrilled to belt out “Since U Been Gone” and other familiar hits eight times a week in “& Juliet.” The show has already been extended until May 17, but if demand is high it could be extended further.

Her parents, who have lived in Vienna for the past decade, are coming to the opening of the show. Her mother is partly responsible for her career. She convinced the teenage Sears to pursue musical theatre, even though she had been accepted to multiple universities for veterinary science.

“I had done community theatre and had some great teachers and mentors,” said Sears. “We knew nothing about how you studied theatre. When I auditioned for Sheridan, I didn’t even bring piano sheet music. Luckily, Donna Garner had played the same piece I was singing for another student.”

(Sears and Garner would later work on “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” for Mirvish.)

Michael Rubinoff, who launched the now defunct Canadian Music Theatre Project at Sheridan and was the originating producer of the smash hit “Come From Away,” vividly remembers Sears’ entrance audition.

“I immediately thought, ‘She will be our first alumni to win a Tony acting award,’” he told me in an email. “I still believe she will.”

“& Juliet” begins previews Dec. 3 at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, 260 King St. W., and runs until May 17. See mirvish.com for details.