"Stereophonic" thrills with music, but Tony-winner sinks under dialogue
The behind-the-music drama “Stereophonic” arrives in Chicago on waves of buzzy acclaim. The tale of a 1970s rock band thrashing its way to stardom took the 2024 Tonys for best play, direction, set and sound design.
For fans of mega-1970s folk-rockers Fleetwood Mac, playwright David Adjmi’s nearly three-hour drama is catnip. The sublime music and ever-present sexual tension in the drama-with-music evokes both the iconic 1970s band and their blockbuster 1977 album, “Rumours.”
But the production is only intermittently enthralling. When it works, it’s largely thanks to original music by Will Butler (formerly of indie rock band Arcade Fire), performed by a highly competent cast of actor-musicians.
When the music fades, “Stereophonic” gets way too close to being a turgid soap opera. At 90 minutes, the high drama among brilliant musicians with tangled relationships would be wholly scintillating. At close to 180 minutes, things get mired in psycho-sexual banalities.
Directed (as on Broadway) by Daniel Aukin, the four-act play-with-music mirrors the New York production and runs through Feb. 8 at the Loop’s CIBC Theatre. “Stereophonic” leans way into the correlation between art and angst, sublimity and suffering, sex and song, offering a hyper-granular view of the emotional, exhausting, tedious work that goes into making artistic sausage.
It’s a solid concept — back in the day, MTV made millions off “Behind the Music.” Alas, between the music, “Stereophonic” veers into laboriousness.
The often overlapping dialogue unspools between June 1976 and June 1977, as an unnamed band lays down tracks for its upcoming album. In the studio: Obsessive, abusive front-man Peter (Denver Milord); his romantic partner, singer/songwriter Diana (Claire DeJean); keyboardist/vocalist Holly (Emilie Kouatchou); Holly’s love interest, bassist Reg (Christopher Mowod); and click-track averse drummer Simon (Cornelius McMoyler). Running the soundboard are Grover (Jack Barrett) and Charlie (Steven Lee Johnson).
Diana and Holly are polar opposites in many ways. Diana withers at Peter’s passive-aggressive cruelty and relentless criticism, internalizing it with painful intensity. Holly, by contrast, clearly wields the power in her relationship with bassist Reg: His drunken blubbering after their breakup only abates when Holly condescends to give him another chance.
Both women are at their best when the music takes hold, the flawed, abusive men in their lives eclipsed by sheer force of jaw-dropping vocal talent.
With “Drive,” Kouatchou sends out searing, transcendent pathos that fills the theater like a benediction. In “East of Eden,” DeJean delivers a climatic high note with a singular blend of ferocity and vulnerability. Butler’s music and lyrics add layers and perspective to the social among bandmembers and their fast-rising stardom. DeJean’s the bittersweet “Bright” — a ballad about losing yourself in the glare of spotlights — is also memorable, its aching melody a gorgeous meditation on fame.
Milord’s Peter wears his ego like a crown, forcing the group to go days without sleeping while he writes and rewrites riffs and orchestrations. Milord is excellent, but Peter's arrogance and casual, relentless cruelty makes him hard to watch.
Mowod’s Reg ably captures that obnoxious brand of noisy, overwrought melancholy brought on by substance abuse and heartache. Mowood finds the comedy in tragedy, wailing under a blanket, coke, booze, weed and insomnia heightening his outsize emotional turmoil. And as the drummer Simon, McMoyler finds the humor and the humanity in an obsessive meltdown over clicktracks.
In some respects, Grover and Charlie — the sound engineers who are often on the outside of the creative process looking in — are the most interesting characters on stage. Grover lied on his resume to get his job. Charlie got his through family connections; he’s cousins with the Doobie Brothers. Neither has the experience to deal with a band positioned for global stardom and a recording budget bigger than Pink Floyd’s quarter-billion selling album “Dark Side of the Moon.”
Grover’s evolution from quiet timidity to full-voiced authority is a joy to watch. As for Johnson’s “Doobie cousin,” he’s an endless font of off-beat comedy.
David Zinn’s two-level set design is a period-perfect recording studio of the era (including a register used when Gladys Knight and the Pips recorded “Midnight Train to Georgia”). You can practically smell the sweat, weed and coke permeating the place
Tony-winning sound designer Ryan Rumery makes the music resonate gorgeously, whether it’s a simple, unplugged guitar strum from Peter or one of Simon’s epic drum riffs.
Butler’s score toggles between mesmerising and frustrating. “Seven Roads” thrums with the Eagles-like harmonies. “Masquerade” has the haunting, percussive insistence of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.”
There’s museum-quality costume- and wig-design on stage. Charlie’s hair is pure “Hardy Boys”-era Sean Cassidy; Diana and Holly’s bellbottoms could have come from my older sister’s closet, circa 1977.
“Stereophonic” captures a seminal sound of the late-1970s, but like many great artistic products, it could use an editor to more effectively streamline the dialogue.