Stereophonic on Broadway
Stereophonic, the cleverly crafted play by David Adjmi, directed with surgical precision by Daniel Aukin, that plays like a Frederick Wiseman fly-on-the-wall documentary, snagged a Tony for Best Play. It’s easy to see why.
Set in a Sausalito recording studio circa 1976 and clocking in at just over three hours, Stereophonic painstakingly chronicles the grueling, sometime tedious, year-long creation of a best-selling rock album.
The play’s unnamed band consists of an American couple, an English couple and another Brit on drums who has left wife and kiddies back home. Rock cognoscenti had no difficulty seeing that the British-American band in Stereophonic looks an awful lot like Fleetwood Mac.
Among those who noticed a similarity was Kenneth Caillat who wrote “Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album,” a memoir of his adventures as a sound engineer and co-producer of that massively successful album. Caillat and his co-writer are suing Adjmi and his producers, claiming that Stereophonic is an “unauthorized adaptation” of his book. That could provide grist for an interesting courtroom drama should it come to trial. But I digress.
There is no real plot to Stereophonic in the conventional sense of the word, but there is plenty of character development. The relentless pressure to produce great songs, not to mention the drugs, take their toll as time wears on.
The two couples fracture and the drummer loses his family. The American lead singer becomes increasingly strident, a control freak’s control freak. His girlfriend finds the backbone to strike out on her own, becoming a powerhouse solo artist. The British bassist, at first so strung out on coke that it’s a wonder he can play at all let alone play masterfully, cleans up his act. Grover, the hapless stoner recording engineer, wins his spurs and becomes a producer on the album.
Sonia Friedman, one of the producers, said that, while there are formulas for what makes a Broadway play, the true successes tend to be those that break those formulas. Stereophonic is a case in point.
Stereophonic belongs to a genre of essentially plotless plays in which the audience is invited into places they seldom see to watch working men and women do what they do. It reminded me of the work of David Storey, whose The Changing Room, about a team of semi-pro rugby players in the North of England, made John Lithgow a star in 1974. His 1970 work, The Contractor, simply showed a group of workers constructing an elaborate marquee, or tent, to host an outdoor wedding celebration in the first act, only to clean up the mess, disassemble it, and cart it off in the second.
It’s hard to explain why plays like this can be so fascinating, but they certainly can be, as Stereophonic so vividly demonstrates. Not only does the audience realize, at least subliminally, that what they are watching is devilishly difficult to pull off in a theatre, but watching the gradually emerging relationships among the players appeals to the voyeur in all of us.
Stereophonic benefits immensely from the shrewd decision by its producers to place it in the relatively intimate Golden Theatre where we can see those relationships evolve. (It originated Off-Broadway at the 198-seat Playwrights Horizons.)
Stereophonic also stands out because what we see on the stage are gifted musicians in the process of creation, not merely actors pretending. The music was created by Will Butler of the Canadian indie-rock band Arcade Fire whose songs we are privileged to experience, live, as they gestate and come to fruition. The superb sound design is by Ryan Rumery. An original cast album has been released and is available from Amazon and Spotify.
Another thing that can make a play like Stereophonic take flight is a crackerjack cast. I came to this play later in its run and several members of the original cast, all of whom received rapturous notices, have now left. You would be hard pressed to pick out the replacements.
The term of art “ensemble piece” is overused, but if any play on Broadway deserves the moniker, it’s Stereophonic. When the Tony Award nominations were announced, five of the seven actors in the show were named, all of them in the Best Supporting category. This, not incidentally, is another feather in director Aukin’s cap.
So forgive me if I single out a few of the cast. Benjamin Anthony Anderson, replacing Tom Pecinka, is scarily brilliant as the control freak who becomes almost pathological in his perfectionism. Will Brill, who won a Tony, is compelling as the bassist and recovered coke addict.
But I would have awarded the Tony to Eli Gelb whose delineation of Grover, the easy-going pot head recording engineer trying to manage a menagerie of gifted children who are constantly acting out is both hilarious and poignant.
David Zinn’s photographically accurate – and fully functional – recreation of a mid-70s recording studio and the spot-on period costumes of Enver Chakartash add immeasurably to the verisimilitude that a show like Stereophonic demands.
Compelling as it is, the inescapable question is what deeper significance does Adjmi offer us? That I suspect will depend on what individual audience members bring into the theatre. Those who lived through that drug besotted era will find much to remember, fondly or not. Musicians will surely recognize the agony and ecstasy of creation. And there is a universality in the experience of any group of people, rock stars or office workers at Dunder Mifflin, working together that will find resonance in most of us.
These insights are almost accidental. I find myself wondering if Adjmi had what King Lear might have called a “darker purpose,” or is he merely telling a ripping yarn about a bunch of rock musicians.
I suspect that for all its well-deserved success Stereophonic will eventually recede in our collective memories, much as Storey’s work has. There will surely be a national tour and a film has been mentioned. But the ferocious technical demands of the show – it’s Off-Broadway premiere was budgeted at over a million dollars! – and the challenges of casting mitigate against frequent revivals, except at the highest level. And how many of us are left who remember the 70s like it was yesterday? However many of us there are today, there will be fewer tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
Stereophonic is enjoying an open-ended run at the Golden Theatre at 252 West 45th Street in New York. For more information and to purchase ticket visit Stereophonic’s official website.
Footnote: I became interested in seeing Stereophonic thanks to Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics Radio podcast, which produced two fascinating episodes about the creation of the play, How to Make the Coolest Show on Broadway and You Can Make a Killing, but Not a Living. I am indebted to these shows for providing information that I used in this review. You can listen to the shows on the Freakonomics website or via your preferred podcast platform. I highly recommend them.
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