Stereophonic, Oct 2024

Jori, Jeff, and I saw Stereophonic on Broadway on Oct 18, 2024. The performance started before we got to the theater...

We met for dinner before the show, of course, and since Jori and Jeff were in town from outside Chicago I wanted to choose a place that was close to the theater and a genuine New York joint. I chose Friedman's, two blocks from the theater and the site of one of my favorite places. Friedman's is in the space that used to be the Cafe Edison, aka the Polish Tea Room. I discovered the Polish Tea Room not long after moving here and fell in love with their cabbage soup, potato pancakes, the wonderful servers, and the authentic rundown atmosphere. My husband also had a long-standing love affair with the place and we ended up there at least once a month. We were heartbroken when they closed in 2014 and it took a while for us to check out Friedman's, the new place that opened in the same space in 2016. It was much more posh, sort of a dressed-up New York diner - - as expected, it was more expensive and didn't have anywhere close to the charm it used to have, but there were still glimmers of the Polish Tea Room style and the food was good. And it wasn't outrageously expensive. Seemed like a good choice for Jori and Jeff.

We arrived and were told by the hostess that there was a 70-minute time limit for our meal. That felt a little aggressive but whatever. Little did we know the aggression had only just begun! It turned out that they were doing a "singing server" situation. We would not have gone there if we had known but we decided to give it a whirl, it might be amusing. It was not, it was relentlessly loud and shrill, an assault rather than an entertainment. Our server sang a song from Jekkyl and Hyde, we also heard 'Let It Go' and two songs from Wicked, "Popular" and "The Wizard and I." Thank God we were spared "Defying Gravity" or maybe we didn't stay long enough. After a bit I said to Jeff and Jori, "I have a feeling we won't make it past SIXTY minutes."

We ate our dinner, paid the check, and still had plenty of time before the show. We hadn't been able to really talk with each other (the sound system was pumped up to 11) so Jeff suggested, "How about we go somewhere more quiet and restful - - like the middle of Times Square?"

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Stereophonic is a play by David Adjmi with songs by Will Butler. The play got a lot of buzz in its off Broadway run and more buzz when it moved to Broadway. It got more Tony nominations than any previous play in Tony history and seemed like a shoo-in for Best Play, which it won. Here's an MSNBC feature on the show.

I read up a bit on the show when I bought my ticket and everyone described it as NOT being about Fleetwood Mac recording Rumours. Well, you hear this four or five times and you start to get the feeling it really IS about Fleetwood Mac recording Rumours. Sure enough, a few weeks before we saw the show Ken Caillat, who had been a sound engineer and producer of Rumours, filed a lawsuit against the makers of Stereophonic saying that they had stolen very precise elements from his memoir Making Rumours. This only made me more excited to see the show!

The play was a knockout! It was exciting, finely wrought, and unlike anything I'd seen before. It might seem a little puzzling to call it a play when the actors spend so much time performing music and music is in some ways at the center of the drama, but the Tony categories classify as a show a play if the music in it is presented as a performance, rather than truly integrated into the story. So these characters perform songs in the sound booth and it's a play - - but Curly walks onto the stage singing "Oh What a Beautiful Mornin' " and it's a musical because he's not performing a song, he's a guy expressing what a beautiful mornin' it is, he just happens to be singing.

Playwright David Adjmi did a genius job of weaving the music with the personal drama of the characters. It made for a rich, rewarding theatrical experience. The songs by Arcade Fire's Will Butler really sounded like songs from the 70s but still fresh. I'm sure that's a difficult needle to thread.

We had two understudies performing our night, one in the role of the lead engineer and the other in the role of the guy who is the self-appointed leader of the band. Both were amazing. Nothing amiss, they were both stellar. I imagine having an understudy doing a performance gives a different energy to the other actors - - and in a show with seven actors, having TWO understudies must make a very big difference indeed.

I wonder what kind of legs this show will have. I think it'll tour like a dream because people will be interested to see "that show about Rumours" but will it be done by local theater companies? It's very difficult to cast because you need five actors who can really sing and/or play instruments and still 100% hold their own as actors in a play. Maybe some lucky actor will do the circuit, with two months in Minneapolis, two months in Seattle, and two months in Austin. Who knows.

Jori added this: "There was a point at the end when the engineer was so happy to be done with them and pivot out of survival mode (trauma recovery needed) and they were all just so oblivious to the drama, pain, and havoc they were leaving in their wake as they skyrocketed into the realm of ridiculous fame & fortune. Wow. That hit me hard. It is exhausting to live so close to the drama vortex. I’ve tried it. I don’t like it."