By far the most engrossing play of the Broadway season just concluded was Stereophonic (at the Golden Theatre through January 5, 2025), a piece by David Adjmi featuring a small number of songs by Will Butler, formerly of the band Arcade Fire. The first play ever to earn thirteen Tony nominations, it won five, including best play for Adjmi and an even more deserved best-director trophy for Daniel Aukin.
The two words Adjmi hates to say are the ones most relevant to the story: Fleetwood Mac. The entire production—which runs over three hours and yet is never anything other than mesmerizing—takes place in a modest yet wholly believable recreation of a 1970s recording studio, with the sound board upstage and the soundproof booth for the recording artists behind it. The action is so shamelessly borrowed from the making of the album Rumours (1977) that the play even specifies, via supertitle, that the studio work takes place first in Sausalito, later in Los Angeles. Those are the locations where the mega-selling Seventies album was made.
Adjmi and Aukin immediately establish a level of you-are-there verisimilitude that is exceedingly rare on the stage, with banal, overlapping technical dialogue about sound checks thrown in with banal overlapping dialogue about coffee and what band members did the previous night. Occasionally there’s a matter-of-fact break for cocaine ingestion; the drug was apparently no more worthy of remark than a cup of Maxwell House at the time, at least in Hollywood.
While the play is sometimes derided as a fictionalized episode of the old television documentary Behind the Music, that show was notable for its slick cutting and interviews. Documentaries are a question of editing; given the same heap of footage, two filmmakers might present completely opposing narratives. The play, however, takes place in three long chunks of real time, letting the drama unfold in a breathtakingly naturalistic way. The characters never speak to the audience, and there is almost no sense that the material is being packaged to entertain or enlighten us. It’s as if we’re present at the creation of one of the defining rock albums of the era, witnesses to a clash of values and egos and self-doubt and self-poisoning that could have led nowhere but resulted in a pop work of lasting value.
As was true of the actual band, there are three Brits: the drummer Simon (Chris Stack), who is married to a woman unseen in the play and not in the group; and the married couple Holly (Juliana Canfield), who sings and plays keyboards, and the bassist Reg (Will Brill). There are also two Americans who are dating each other: the singer-songwriter Diana (Sarah Pidgeon) and the guitarist-singer-songwriter Peter (Tom Pecinka). All of these details exactly correspond to the backgrounds of Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, John McVie, Stevie Nicks, and Lindsey Buckingham. As in reality, all five of these artists undergo romantic breakups during the making of the album, and we get to witness the harrowing arguments between the alcoholic Reg (Brill also won a Tony for the role) and the sweet-natured Holly, interwoven with the increasingly nasty spats between the emotionally fragile Diana and the demanding, dismissive perfectionist Peter. Simon, during one memorable extended interlude, can’t get his drumming to sound right, and as he spirals into a tantrum, it turns out his wife is leaving him.
As he spirals into a tantrum, it turns out his wife is leaving him.
Among many highlights, which include watching the actors play their own instruments as they run through several pretty fair pastiches of Seventies rock, the show’s most wrenching scene is a grueling exchange between Diana (Pidgeon is a star in the making, heartbreaking in her sensitivity) and her boyfriend Peter (who, as Pecinka plays him, lacks rock-star charisma and seems unworthy of her). Driven to the brink by his curt condescension, she tells the two sound engineers, Grover (Eli Gelb) and Charlie (Andrew R. Butler), to silence their microphones so she can pull Peter away for a quick talk in a secluded corner of the studio (invisible to at least some in the audience). The engineers, who obligingly switch the sound off to give the feuding pair some privacy, then oblige their own curiosity (and the audience’s) by switching it back on. In this tête-à-tête—the breathless centerpiece of the play—is the horrifying disintegration of a long romance. From his side, the inability to be decorous or emotionally intelligent is to blame; from hers, a fundamental lack of self-confidence makes her crumble under pressure. Another of the play’s searing moments (this one evidently inspired by the recording of “You Make Loving Fun,” which took months to assemble from many takes) has Holly, Peter, and Diana sharing a microphone to sing repeatedly a small portion of a backing vocal. While they’re concocting this little piece of California candy amid several equipment failures that require them to take breaks, Diana and Peter look furious. The contrast between the lightness of their sound and the contempt on their faces is an amusing reminder that art doesn’t necessarily reflect the mood of its creators.
Yet the work on the album continues. Rumours doesn’t quite live up to its reputation as a monument to pain—it did, after all, give us the sunny anthem “Don’t Stop” and the peppy “You Make Loving Fun.” Moreover, “Go Your Own Way,” Buckingham’s guitar-forward breakup number, is blistering, but “Packin’ up, shackin’ up, is all you want to do,” its bitterest line, is hardly a spray of acid. “Dreams,” about the breakup from Nicks’s point of view, ends with an expression of hope that the rain will wash him clean of his sadness. Angry, depressing music was being made by rock groups at the time, but for the most part the California-mellow Rumours isn’t an example of it.
Stereophonic is nevertheless a staggering achievement, far more powerful than the album that inspired it. It’s as much about professionalism as it is about pain: when there’s an agreement to make something together, even if you are standing next to a colleague you may have grown to despise, it’s imperative to push on. Some of the most pampered rock stars on earth, the play reminds us, still managed to put work first. The play creates a sense of gratitude, perhaps awe, that artists in a state of infernal disquiet can work in harmony, at least for long enough to create forty minutes of hummable music.
The most unexpected and most gratifying success of the Broadway season is the utterly delightful third Broadway iteration of The Wiz (which closed August 18 at the Marquis Theatre but is preparing for a national tour), which raked in well over a million dollars a week despite critical dismissal. The original 1975 production ran for more than four years, even as the theater district was widely considered unsafe at night (though it flopped in its 1984 revival), and was one of the first shows to advertise extensively with television commercials. Those spots are why the chorus of “Ease on Down the Road” is embedded in the consciousness of anyone who watched New York City television stations at the time. (The song was never actually a radio hit, however; the single associated with the original production and a follow-up, sung by Diana Ross and Michael Jackson to support the disastrous 1978 film version directed by Sidney Lumet, both failed to crack the top forty.)
It’s hard to say which of them is the most inventive dancer or the funniest comic actor.
Especially since the George Floyd summer of 2020, Broadway has desperately searched for a black-themed show both to soothe its racial amour propre and to reach out to black putative ticket buyers, but virtually without exception these productions, despite having black authors and/or directors, channeled the sensibility of aggressively woke white liberals, and virtually without exception they failed to lure anyone else into their stalls. The Wiz (music and lyrics by Charlie Smalls, original book by William F. Brown) is an all-black show with a largely black creative team (Brown, who died in 2019, was white) and a black director, Schele Williams, that makes no racial statements whatsoever and is content merely to entertain. “I wonder if a revival of one of theater’s beloved Black musicals is truly a Black experience,” wrote a sniffy Maya Phillips of The New York Times. “It feels more like just another night at the theater.” Just so! It’s another night at the musical-comedy theater—an institution that is supposed to deliver pleasing tunes and make us laugh. The Wiz ignores the race police. It is uninterested in questions of “Blackness.” It is merely a black show, not a Black one. And it’s the rare show to attract a lot of black theatergoers. When I saw it, the audience was perhaps half black.
There is a lot of praise to go around: thanks to the comedian and talk-show host Amber Ruffin, who rewrote the book, the dialogue is the funniest offered in a musical in years, and the intensely physical performances are all hilarious. Though Nichelle Lewis has the somewhat thankless task of playing the bland Dorothy, she sings wonderfully and is surrounded by physical-comedy adepts who recall the energetic vaudeville training of Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, and Jack Haley from the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. (Although the source material by L. Frank Baum is in the public domain, the movie is not. The stage show is not produced by Warner Bros., which owns the film and jealously guards elements specific to it, such as Dorothy’s ruby-red slippers. The shoes were silver in Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and are silver in the show.) Dorothy’s companions are this time portrayed by Avery Wilson (Scarecrow), Philip Johnson Richardson (Tinman), and Kyle Ramar Freeman (Lion), and it’s hard to say which of them is the most inventive dancer or the funniest comic actor. Each of them performs acrobatically in a showcase number, yet I’d say all of them are eclipsed by Melody A. Betts, who doubles the role of Auntie Em and later the Wicked Witch (this time called Evilene). Betts delivers the spectacular gospel spoof “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News,” the most electrifying of several showstoppers. Another is “Brand New Day,” a pop–R&B number that’s as catchy as “Ease on Down the Road.” (The best-known performer in the show, the game-show host Wayne Brady, was amusing in the title role but has departed since I saw him.) Broadway would do well to abandon its self-assigned role of being a cultural instructor or instigator and produce more cheerfully unambitious work. It could even achieve its thirsted-for audience diversity if only it would keep in mind that the audience has rarely shown much interest in bizarre, abstruse, or depressing plays. Black need not equal bleak.
Why does the wicked, degenerate Emcee of Cabaret have six-pack abs? Why does Sally Bowles scream the peppy title number as though she’s undergoing limb amputation without anesthesia? Why is the theater transformed into a club when most of the show takes place in a boarding house? Why, in short, this Cabaret?
Fresh from the West End as directed by Rebecca Frecknall on a gargantuan budget (reportedly $24 million), Cabaret is the theater equivalent of the costliest Hollywood blockbuster of the summer, and it’s made with as much heart and soul as the average Transformers movie. Frecknall’s design team has spent millions on a redesign of the August Wilson Theatre to transform it into the Kit Kat Club where the Emcee (Eddie Redmayne is regrettable) and the star Sally Bowles (Gayle Rankin is insufferable) hold court. Patrons paying super-premium prices in the front rows of a show presented in the round are treated to café tables, champagne, and other treats; behind these, seats are equipped with shelving to encourage boozing, and I was handed a glass of cherry schnapps on the way in. Just as comedy clubs enforce two-drink minimums to get people in a jolly mood, Cabaret seeks to achieve entertainment by way of inebriation. (As a working but not necessarily esteemed member of the press, I was also given a wristband that apparently entitled me to unlimited free beverages.)
Cabaret seeks to achieve entertainment by way of inebriation.
The doors open seventy-five minutes before curtain so that ticket-holders can wend their way through a seedy (or, rather, “seedy”) labyrinth of corridors, past the lavatories labeled “Damen” and “Herren,” and into a pre-show show called the “prologue” (directed by Jordan Fein), where dancers clad in naughty Weimar scanties sing and writhe above the audience on a small stage with a band that foregrounds clarinet, saxophone, and accordion. The whole setup is meant to engage millennials, who are notoriously fond of “immersive experiences” that make them feel like they’re actively engaging in their evening’s diversion. That the prologue dancers are trying way too hard—sweatily attempting to mime the idea of decadence—foreshadows how the evening will go. The relative subtlety of the most widely seen Cabaret—Bob Fosse’s 1972 film adaptation, in which the dinginess of Sally’s life counterbalanced the release she found on stage in the small club—is forcefully rejected.
Staging John Kander and Fred Ebb’s 1966 musical (the book, by Joe Masteroff, is based on the now-forgotten 1951 Broadway play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten, which was inspired by Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin) in a simulacrum of a club has been done before, notably and wittily at the onetime New York headquarters of musical decadence, Studio 54, in the 1998 production (starring Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson) that ran for nearly six years, much longer than the first iteration three decades before that. The composer Kander (who just is ninety-seven) and the lyricist Ebb (who died in 2004 at ninety-six) kept tinkering with the song list as new productions emerged. “Mein Herr” and “Maybe This Time,” for instance, both of which are now beloved, were added for the movie.
Any show about singing and Nazis should fight the tendency to be melodramatic, but Cabaret indulges it. To the extent it has a plot, it takes place in the boarding house where Sally welcomes the American newcomer Clifford Bradshaw (Ato Blankson-Wood)—one of the blandest lead characters in Broadway history—into her orbit while the owner, Fräulein Schneider (Bebe Neuwirth), is wooed by another tenant, a Jewish fruit peddler named Herr Schultz (Steven Skybell). All of this comes across as stagy and soapy rather than moving or historically chilling, and Rankin is utterly charmless and sexless as Sally, who is supposed to be hard as brass on the surface, soft as lebkuchen beneath. Liza Minnelli’s endearing performance—her mix of tender sincerity and showgirl vivacity—provided an excellent model that Rankin ignores.
It’s as if she and Redmayne are participating in a private in-joke: Which of us can show off more? Is there any amount of overacting that will strike the audience as too much, or will all that champagne and schnapps put them in a mood eager for histrionics? The stage barely exists: it’s simply a rotating circular platform, with a riser periodically emerging from the bottom and another riser coming out of that one, to create a three-tiered wedding cake. But with no scenery to situate them, the actors belt and mug and shout and clamor. The Emcee is supposed to be seductive, even funny; yet Redmayne (who also played the earnest Marius in the film version of Les Misérables) does not have an ounce of comedy in him and consequently left me feeling misérable. Everyone involved in this production, from the costumer on up, has simply lost touch with the essence of Cabaret—in which Nazism, evil, and moral decay are meant to lurk in the background—and turned it into a musical-theater air-raid siren.