9 hours ago
Stereophonic
Stereophonic playwright David Adjmi recently wrote an article for a major British newspaper in which he waxed effusively about how his Broadway smash had been inspired by the band Led Zeppelin.
I wonder if his lawyer was holding a gun to his head as he wrote it, because while the Zep may have been a tertiary influence, Stereophonic is very very very very very very very clearly about Fleetwood Mac. There are Fleetwood Mac fan conventions less about Fleetwood Mac. Hell, there are incarnations of Fleetwood Mac that have been less about Fleetwood Mac.
Specifically, it's a lightly fictionalised account of the recording of the Anglo-American band's mega-selling Rumours album, and while not every detail is the same, many are identical, from the cities it was recorded in (Sausalito then LA) to the gender, nationality and internal-relationship makeup of the band, to details like female members 'Holly' (aka Christine McVie) and 'Diana' (aka Stevie Nicks) moving out out the studio accommodation they were sharing with the band's menfolk in favour of their own condominiums.
Which l hasten to say is all to the good, even if it frequently feels like a miracle that Stereophonic has stormed Broadway – becoming the most Tony-nominated play of all time – without being derailed by legal issues (though there is a lawsuit against it from Rumours producer Ken Caillet, who has accused Adjmi of ripping off his memoir).
Of course, it is a great subject for a play. The story of how erstwhile blues noodlers Fleetwood Mac recorded one of the greatest pop albums in history, while breaking up with each other, while on drugs isn't simply a bit of pop trivia: it's a parable on the nature of the creative process.
It's an incredibly tricky story to tell in a way that doesn't come across all VH1 Behind the Music. But Stereophonic carries it off spectacularly well.
For starters, the veil of fiction allows Adjmi to portray Peter (Jack Riffiford, basically Lindsay Buckingham) and Reg (Zachary Hart, basically John McVie) as catastrophic fuck ups - the former toxic and controlling, the latter addled and out of control. The reason biographical musicals are uniformly terrible is that the musicians or their estate have to sign the content off before they'll allow their songs to be used, resulting in tediously flattering portraits. That does not happen here.
For all their faults it's a pleasure spending time with these fuck ups
And then there are the songs by erstwhile Arcade Fire man Will Butler. They don't sound anything like Fleetwood Mac really: at a pinch you could argue they sound like Arcade Fire gone '70s soft rock. The lyrics don't have the stinging rawness of Rumours – it would be clunky cosplay to try and write a song like 'Go Your Own Way' for this project. But they're rousing, emotional, layered tunes, written for a band with the same makeup of singers and instrumentalists as Fleetwood Mac, performed live by the cast. There's a notable scene in which the band go through endless takes of a track called 'Masquerade': spoiler etc, but the scene finally ends with them getting it right – the scene would fall flat if it wasn't a good song. So no, Butler hasn't written Rumours II, or even tried. But Daniel Aukin's production hinges on the songs written for it being good enough to feel credible, which is pretty audacious.
Structurally, it's a three-and-a-bit-hour interrogation of the creative process that features little more than the band chatting to each other or recording. Set solely in a windowless studio, director Aukin has supreme confidence in the play's pacing and rhythms. There is a lot – like a lot – of fannying around over drum sounds and guitar tones, but the play leads us to the right psychological space to understand that there's much more to this than musos muso-ing. A blizzard of coke, exhaustion, the enormous pressure to follow up their previous album, and of course cataclysmic inter-band tensions all go some way to explain why the band and their affable engineers Grover (Eli Gelb) and Charlie (Andrew R Butler) find themselves agonising over every detail.
There is a lot about gender and power here. If the broad brushstroke picture is 'band makes an album', the more nuanced one is 'two talented women try to assert themselves in a toxic male-dominated creative environment'. Both Holly (Nia Towle) and Diana (Lucy Karczewski) know their worth. But Holly has to negotiate the broken heart of her ex, Reg, who has pretty much fallen apart after she dumped him and needs to be looked after if they're actually going to make this record. Meanwhile Diana has to deal with the brittle, self-absorbed musical virtuoso Peter, who she's still in a relationship with. His natural sense of perfectionism has been curdled by resentment over Diana's rising star status in the band, and his many snarling putdowns of her work are deeply uncomfortable. Zoom in even closer, and it's the story of Diana stepping out from Peter's control – at the beginning she's subservient to him for the sake of keeping the peace, but she will soon reject this volcanically.
It's worth stressing that Stereophonic is extremely entertaining, because it's a show about seven great characters, and the reason the characters are so great is largely because the IRL Fleetwood Mac are a great bunch of characters. For all their faults it's a pleasure spending time with these fuck ups, from Towle's tough, brassy Holly to Chris Stack's avuncular-but-edgy Simon (ie the Mick Fleetwood character). Knob twiddlers Grover and Charlie aren't based on famous people, but still counterbalance the story, a couple of guys who might have expected themselves to be out of their depth musically instead finding themselves totally stumped by the band's emotional problems
If there's one thing beyond a degree of legal protection that Stereophonic obviously gains from not technically being about Fleetwood Mac, it's that it ends on a genuinely uncertain note, and not with, I dunno, the band slamming through 'The Chain' while stats about the album's colossal sales flash up. Was this tectonic creative process worth all the damage inflicted for the music it created? Rumours is so beloved now that it's hard to conclude the band should have actually sacked it off. And you'd probably say the same for the Stereophonic band to be honest. But without the quadrillions of sales and instantly recognisable tunes, the damage these people did to each other in the name of art is brought home with devastating eloquence.
