Huey Lewis’ rom-com musical lands on Broadway

The production’s origins trace back to 2009 when producer Tyler Mitchell contacted Lewis about turning his music into a stage show. Mitchell, who once bagged the musician’s groceries as an adolescent when they both lived in Ross, said several songs already had a narrative thread.

After Huey Lewis learned that a syndrome of the inner ear called Ménière’s disease had caused him significant hearing loss and left him unable to play or hear music, he faced the difficult task of having to tell his friends and peers.

Marin’s homegrown star, whose wry lyrics and rumbling vocals powered Reagan-era pop hits like “I Want a New Drug” and “If This Is It,” turned to people like Tico Torres, the longtime Bon Jovi drummer, whom he’d gotten to know on golfing trips. But their conversation proved to be an unexpected source of the pragmatic philosophy that Lewis built his career on.

Over a breakfast interview last month, Lewis delivered a lively, solo re-enactment of that fateful talk with Torres.

“He goes, ‘Hey, Huey, how ya doing?’” Lewis recalled. “I say, ‘Tico, it’s not good.’ And I begin to explain. I said, ‘I’ve lost my hearing and I can’t hear pitch. I can’t sing.’”

“I’m telling him the whole story and he’s going like this” — here, Lewis lowered his head, furrowed his bushy brows over his eyeglasses and shook his head in dismay. Slipping into an imitation of Torres’ New Jersey accent, Lewis said, “When I finish, he goes, ‘Whaddaya gonna do?’”

“So that’s my mantra,” Lewis continued. “What are you going to do? Really, it’s a pretty good question. I don’t know. Still working on it.”

Lewis had already halted his performing career before he went public with his diagnosis in 2020. But while his relationship to his art has fundamentally changed, he has continued to work on a new Broadway musical, “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” which is built around many of the songs he made famous with Huey Lewis and the News.

The musical, which opens April 22 at the James Earl Jones Theatre in New York, spins Lewis’ tunes like “Hip to Be Square,” “Workin’ for a Livin’” and the title track into a fictional story set in the 1980s about a couple (played by Corey Cott and McKenzie Kurtz) torn between pop-star ambitions and corporate opportunities.

It is a project more than a decade in the making, one that began before Lewis learned about the disease that has upended his life and given the musical an unexpected sense of urgency.

As Lewis, 73, explained, “Zen Buddhists say you need three things: Something to love, something to hope for and something to do.”

“I got plenty to love,” he continued. “So this is my hope-for and my to-do. It keeps me from reflecting on my (expletive) hearing.”

Telling stories

A gregarious, exuberant storyteller, Lewis will readily regale a listener with tales from his picaresque career, like his formative days in Clover, a Bay Area band that arrived in London just in time to see their country-rock sound become swept away by the punk movement; or the hours he spent driving to set with Robert Altman when Lewis played a role in the filmmaker’s 1993 ensemble comedy-drama “Short Cuts.”

Recalling some of Altman’s advice, Lewis said, “He told me, ‘Learn the script. Read it every day. Find your character to the point where you know what he had for breakfast. And then don’t listen to anybody.’”

Lewis’ fellow musicians describe him as dedicated and reliable, which comes across in Bao Nguyen’s documentary “The Greatest Night in Pop,” about the making of the 1985 all-star charity song “We Are the World.”

In response to email questions, Lionel Richie recalled Lewis coming onto the project at the last minute, taking over a part that had been written for Prince.

Even so, Richie said, “I remember him eagerly jumping in with confidence and patience.”

“The Huey we saw in the documentary all those years ago is the same Huey we see today,” Richie added. “Fast forward to the night of the documentary premiere — he was still a nervous wreck over that night while watching the screening! His humor, his compassion and his welcoming spirit are just a few of the things that haven’t changed since the day I met him.”

In person, Lewis can hear well enough to conduct face-to-face conversations. He sometimes uses a discreet, disc-shaped listening device, which broadcasts wirelessly to a hearing aid in his ear.

But when he is in group settings, Lewis said, it can feel as though he is “in a cocoon.”

“I sit there like this,” he said, pretending to nod and smile at nothing in particular. “Can’t hear a thing.”

Lewis is also candid in talking about the despair he felt after learning that he might never be able to perform music again. Though he had experienced hearing loss in his right ear since the 1980s, he said the hearing in his left ear became suddenly and significantly distorted before a show in Dallas in January 2018.

“I’m mainly a half-full guy,” Lewis said, but what followed were “the most miserable six months of my life.”

Finding purpose

“I contemplated my demise,” he said. “I laid in bed. I tried acupuncture, cranial massage, chiropractors, all-organic diet.” No matter which doctors he spoke to or which cures he tried, Lewis said they all yielded the same results: “Nothing.”

In that period, Lewis said that talking to his grown children — his son, Austin, and his daughter, Kelly — is what eventually gave him the confidence to move forward. “They said, ‘Come on, Dad. Get out of bed, Dad,’” he explained.

When Lewis felt able to resume work, “The Heart of Rock and Roll” — several years into its development — was ready for him to return to it.

The production’s origins trace back to 2009 when producer Tyler Mitchell contacted Lewis about turning his music into a stage show.

Mitchell, who once bagged the musician’s groceries as an adolescent when they both lived in Ross, said several songs already had a narrative thread.

“His songs resonate with so many people because they tackle a lot of relatable subjects: following your dreams versus playing it safe, love and relationships, friendship, blue-collar working,” Mitchell explained. In his idealized version of the show, he said, Lewis’ songs would provide not just the score but “a massive part of the actual storytelling.”

But Lewis, who has done two stints as Billy Flynn in the Broadway revival of “Chicago,” had been approached with similar offers and was wary.

When it came to the genre of jukebox musicals — he and his creative partners prefer the term “catalog musicals” — a show was not guaranteed to be a hit just because it used popular songs.

As Lewis put it, “If the Beach Boys can’t succeed, and Abba does? I’m just saying. But what we forget about ‘Mamma Mia!’ is that the book really is great.”

Lewis wanted a show to tell a compelling story, and he felt he found that in a pitch from screenwriter Jonathan A. Abrams (“Juror No. 2”).

Abrams said he began constructing the musical’s book by writing down lyrics to the group’s various songs, hanging them on his wall and studying them in obsessive detail.

“I stood back like I was looking at a painting,” he said. “And words would jump out. ‘Hip’ and ‘heart,’ and ‘soul’ and ‘power’ and ‘love.’ From there, I was able to start to formulate what this thing is demanding to be.”

Lewis did not particularly mind that the show does not tell an autobiographical story, explaining that many of his best-known songs were only ever loosely based on his life.

“You know, the muse comes when she comes,” he said. “It’s usually from something personal. And when you begin to write the song, you exaggerate. You embellish.”

Readings and workshops followed, but only a few weeks before announcing that the show would have its premiere at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, Lewis experienced his abrupt hearing loss in Dallas.

The show’s collaborators learned about this from Lewis soon after.

“It was very, very painful to watch that happen to such a great person who loves music, and loves performing so much,” Mitchell said. “To have that part of his life taken from him was truly difficult.”

But Mitchell said he did not contemplate halting or canceling the plans for the musical. “Huey would never let that happen,” he said. “Huey doesn’t give up.”

At the Old Globe, Lewis was on hand to contribute — and to step back when he felt he wasn’t needed, said the musical’s director, Gordon Greenberg, who directed the 2016 Broadway production of “Holiday Inn.”

“He was there every day in rehearsals, 9 a.m. with us, laughing and offering suggestions,” Greenberg said, “and also understanding, where he said, ‘Here’s what I’m seeing — but I’m going to just let you guys go.’”

Lewis, who attended several performances of “The Heart of Rock and Roll” at the Old Globe, said with a chuckle, “I kept wanting to redirect — to change things. ‘Oh, no, he’s doing that all wrong.’”

He added, “I can’t get objective about it and that’s what I’ll do with this show forever. But I love it, and I like where we’re going.”

Reviewing the Old Globe production for the Los Angeles Times, Charles McNulty wrote that one’s enjoyment of the musical will most likely depend “on how nostalgic you are for Huey Lewis & the News,” adding that his own “surreptitious survey of theatergoers suggests this kind of material must have a pleasant tranquilizing effect.”

Lewis has contributed a new song for the Broadway production, called “Be Someone,” for which he shares credit with his bandmate and San Anselmo resident Johnny Colla and the show’s musical director, Brian Usifer.

“I sang the parts into my iPhone and sent them to Johnny and Johnny demoed it all up and tweaked it,” Lewis explained in a phone interview, adding that this was a new process for him.

“I can sing to myself,” he said, “but I can’t sing to anything because I can’t hear pitch. We just changed the lyric two days ago. You got to pick your battles.”

Lewis is considering cochlear implant surgery and is scheduled to have a consultation this spring. He said that in his day-to-day life, he has gained a greater appreciation for pastimes like reading and fishing, but that nothing will ever quite replicate the pleasure of simply listening to a jazz album while he’s cooking at home.

“I don’t miss doing five shows a week,” he said. “I don’t miss travel at all. But I do miss a show once in a while. And I miss the circus that was our show. But OK — take away singing. Take away performing. I can’t even enjoy music.”

And yet, Lewis said “The Heart of Rock and Roll” has given him a new appreciation for his own music because the show presents it in new ways and makes narrative connections across his body of work.

“There’s a personality in the songs that I only recognized when I saw them performed in the show,” Lewis said. “I realized, wow, there’s a thread that runs through all these. It’s not my story but there’s a sensibility that pervades everything.”

Seeing his decades-old music reflected back at him, Lewis came to realize it was not just working but living and thriving in the production.

“To see the songs take on this other life,” he said, “it’s like seeing your children grow up and get a job.”