ajhlovestheatre

THE HEART OF ROCK AND ROLL

Inspired by the songs of Huey Lewis and The News

Book by Jonathan A Abrams

Story by Tyler Mitchell and Jonathan A Abrams

Directed by Gordon Greenberg

James Earl Jones Theatre, New York City – open ended run

https://heartofrocknrollbway.com

There’s a lot of theatrical snobbery around the jukebox musical genre – for every & Juliet or Our House, there’s a Daddy Cool or a Tonight’s The Night – but when a show is as fresh, well-crafted and just flat-out delightful as this new Broadway tuner built around Huey Lewis’s apparently inexhaustible song stack, resistance is futile. That’s particularly true when Jonathan A Abram’s genuinely funny and touching script and Gordon Greenberg’s effervescent production are good enough to stand up to pretty robust critical analysis while at the same time giving audiences a really wonderful time.

This might be the best integrated jukebox musical since the Madness-Tim Firth-Matthew Warchus Our House in that, if you walked in not realising that Huey Lewis and The News are a platinum selling band, you’d probably assume this was a custom built 1980s-set rom com studded with catchy soft rock numbers created for this specific story. That’s no mean feat, but The Heart of Rock and Roll wears its artfulness lightly.

The plot’s not exactly challenging: nice guy Bobby who gave up on his rock band stardom dreams for a steady pay check in a cardboard box factory (try to contain your excitement) gets fired for a costly mistake, is reinstated when he redeems himself, gets involved with the boss’s daughter and finds his music career possibilities reignited at the most inconvenient moment. So far, so anodyne…but Abrams populates his story with such a sweetly eccentric rogues gallery of characters and writes with such wit and feeling, that what could have felt tediously predictable comes off as warm, quirky and surprisingly satisfying. It also finds an interesting tension in Bobby’s dilemma, and the ending is slightly unexpected.

It also helps that in leading man Corey Cott the show has a bona fide heartthrob, one who sings and swaggers like a true rocker, has charm and vulnerability, can point a funny line, and looks, frankly, gorgeous. He’s reminiscent of a young Hugh Jackman, even down to the musculature, and is so adorable it’s impossible not to root for him. That proves especially valuable later in the second half when he breaks down in a cri de cœur solo lamenting his fractured relationship with his now departed father. It provides a surprisingly powerful emotional centre to what is elsewhere mostly a fun, light-hearted show. Opposite him, McKenzie Kurtz is every bit as fine, investing superficially uptight Cassandra with a kookie manic edge and real heart, in a performance that sometimes recalls Jane Krakowski at her most sparkling.

Other stand-outs include Orville Mendoza as a marvellously bizarre Swedish tycoon, Billy Harrigan Tighe as an oleaginous, ruthless corporate player with designs on Cassandra (look out for the hilarious nightmare -as opposed to dream- ballet where she envisions the matrimonial horrors ahead as his bride) and F Michael Haynie, Raymond J Lee and John-Michael Lyles as Bobby’s bandmates, a trio of man-children whose weirdness is matched only by their heartwarming steadfastness. Broadway veteran John Dossett brings a nice dose of sincerity as Cassandra’s Dad. The superbly drilled ensemble execute Lorin Latarro’s high energy, often highly inventive choreography with skill and gusto (there’s a particularly fun dance on bubble wrap that’s as invigorating as it’s silly, and a bonkers aerobics number).

Best of all there’s Tamika Lawrence as Bobby’s best mate, who is also the not-always PC HR manager in the factory. Lawrence has the god given ability to make any line funny, and when she lets rip vocally….consider yourself blessed. Roz, Lawrence’s character, is gay but it’s only lightly touched upon and in a way that is neither sensationalist nor patronising, another instance of this good-hearted charmer of a show getting it absolutely right.

Derek McLane’s sets, Jen Caprio’s costumes and Nikya Mathis’s wig and hair creations all embrace the 1980s aesthetic with eye-popping, colourful flamboyance that never tips over into the grotesquerie that can sometimes happen when revisiting the decade of big hair, shoulder pads, leg warmers etc. The band and voices are all superb and, if the wrapping up of the plot feels a tad contrived, that’s a minor misstep in a massively likeable show.

The Heart of Rock and Roll isn’t trying to reinvent the genre, but as a crowd-pleasing piece of nostalgic entertainment, appealing equally to the eyes, ears and heart, it succeeds triumphantly. It’s sometimes reminiscent of other shows – The Wedding Singer and Back to the Future, both set in a similar time period and the latter of which it shares ‘The Power of Love’ with as a finale, spring immediately to mind – but this is arguably better put together than either of these despite not being an original score, and ultimately it works on its own terms. “Do you believe in love?” goes one of Huey Lewis’s biggest earworms, used repeatedly here. The answer is a resounding yes.