They Will Rock You

By Richard Zoglin Sunday, July 28, 2002
    • Poor Paul Simon. A few years ago he had the fool idea that a rock composer who wants to make it on Broadway has to go out and actually write new music. He spent years working on his musical The Capeman, only to see it bomb with the critics and at the box office.

    Abba had it so much easier. The Swedish rock group (whose leaders, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, had been burned on Broadway once before, with their 1988 musical Chess) simply sat back and let a bunch of other folks take Abba's hit songs, graft them onto a flimsy story about a girl looking for her real dad on her wedding day and turn Mamma Mia! into a smash hit on Broadway — and just about everywhere else in the Western world.


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    Guess which musical everyone wants to copy?

    It's a post-Mamma Mia! world, and the theater has fallen in love with rock — so long as it's retro. Opening next month on Broadway, accompanied by fervent buzz, is Hairspray, based on the campy John Waters movie and featuring ersatz '50s music by Marc Shaiman. Meanwhile, there's hardly a rock star or group from the '60s, '70s or '80s not about to be celebrated in a songbook musical reprising the greatest hits. We Will Rock You, a sell-out hit in London that boasts Robert De Niro among its backers, sets more than 30 songs of the '70s rock band Queen to a jokey sci-fi fable about a future world where live music has been banned. Billy Joel's oeuvre has been matched to Twyla Tharp's choreography in Movin' Out, which is prepping in Chicago for a Broadway opening this fall. There's a Beach Boys musical in the works and another one on the Doors, and even a Bruce Springsteen show, Drive All Night, with its sights set on Broadway. "Pop music can be overpowering," says Tharp, explaining the appeal of the oldies. "It has so much connotation in people's minds."

    In the minds of many Broadway traditionalists, the trend is unfortunate. They have a point. The peculiar magic of the musical form lies in convincing an audience that story and songs are an organic whole, that one can't live without the other. In most of the rock-songbook shows, the story is simply a clothesline on which to hang some presold hits the audience was humming on the way into the theater. Queen's We Are the Champions and Bohemian Rhapsody may or may not be your idea of great rock, but either way, in the college-revue tedium of We Will Rock You, they don't do much to illuminate story or character — or reach out to anyone but the die-hard Queen fan.

    Not all the retro-rock productions are so crass. A quieter new musical hit in London is an engaging little show called Taboo, which recaps the rise and drug-addled fall of Boy George, the androgynous former lead singer of the band Culture Club. The surprise is that, aside from three old favorites (with Karma Chameleon as the obligatory curtain-call rouser), the show has a new score, written by (former Boy) George O'Dowd himself. Helped by Christopher Renshaw's cabaret-style production and a dead-on performance as George by Euan Morton, O'Dowd's supple melodies and touching but tough lyrics seem to encapsulate the defiantly deviant club world of London in the early '80s: "Call me a taker/ I've got nothin' to give/ Call me a loser/ I'm just tryin' to live." Call Taboo a winner — and let's get it to the U.S.

    Even the debased act of recycling old rock songs can be the occasion for artistic alchemy. Two years ago, Tharp called Joel, whom she had never met, asked him over to the house and told him she wanted to do a musical based on his songs. He said yes, then stepped aside and let Tharp go to town on Movin' Out, a two-act dance musical built around a couple dozen of his songs (not just Uptown Girl and Captain Jack, but some of his classical compositions as well), linking them loosely with a story that spans two decades in the lives of three Long Island buddies and the women in their lives.

    Tharp has done this sort of thing before, but usually in the confines of highbrow dance troupes (like Deuce Coupe, based on Beach Boys music, for the Joffrey Ballet). Here she manages to enhance Joel's music (sung by a Billy stand-in, Michael Cavanaugh, who sits at a piano, accompanied by a 10-piece band, on a platform above the stage) while buoying the spirits with sexy, high-voltage dancing that promises to give Broadway a rush of excitement. Best of all, she does it the old-fashioned, pre-Mamma Mia! way: no dancing in the aisles.