JUKEBOX HEROES 2: HELL’S KITCHEN / THE HEART OF ROCK AND ROLL

In 1981, Joan Jett shouted, “I love rock n’ roll / So put another dime in the jukebox, baby / I love rock n’ roll / So come and take your time and dance with me / Ow!”

When was the last time any of us put a dime — or quarter, or dollar, or credit card — into a jukebox? However, the jukebox musical, a show built around existing songs, usually by a specific artist, is thriving, and it costs a whole lot more than loose change to see one.

The genre kicked off as the ’80s began, shortly before Jett released “I Love Rock n’ Roll,” with such instant favorites as Beatlemania (the Beatles), Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Fats Waller), and Eubie! (Eubie Blake), but it really found its groove in the 2000s, with The Boy from Oz (Peter Allen), Jersey Boys (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons), and king of them all, Rock of Ages, which created a compelling narrative based on songs by Styx, Journey, Bon Jovi, Pat Benatar, Foreigner, Twisted Sister, Steve Perry, Poison, Night Ranger, Europe, Whitesnake, and, well, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts.

There are several keys to a successful jukebox musical, whether biographical or fictional: It has to be able to attract fans and nonfans of the music or musician; it needs to sound more like a Saturday-night cover band than a traditional Broadway orchestra; and if it’s basically historical, it should be honest and thorough, while it should be clever and bold if telling a new tale. Biomusicals about Neil Diamond, Tina Turner, Carole King, Cher, Michael Jackson, Motown, and the Temptations all were lacking that certain something, if not more, while Head over Heels did a terrific job incorporating the songs of the Go-Go’s into a sixteenth-century romance, & Juliet extended Romeo and Juliet with the music of Swedish producer Max Martin (made famous by the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Robyn, Demi Lovato, Katy Perry, *NSYNC, and Justin Timberlake, among others), and Jagged Little Pill used Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album to entertainingly explore a suburban family’s dysfunction.

This season saw the Broadway premiere of two exciting, though very different, jukebox musicals that stand apart from the pack. Although they showcase songs by artists I never play at home, I was thrilled to see them performed onstage by excellent casts.

THE HEART OF ROCK AND ROLL
James Earl Jones Theatre
138 West Forty-Eighth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 23, $58-$288
heartofrocknrollbway.com

The music of Huey Lewis and the News is its own kind of ear candy. The San Francisco band, which started in 1979 and is still together — although they no longer tour because Lewis contracted Ménière’s disease, which causes severe hearing loss — has sold tens of millions of records, boosted by twenty top-fifty singles between 1980 and 1994. Among those to wax poetic about the group was fictional serial killer Patrick Bateman in Bret Eason Ellis’s 1991 novel, American Psycho, and the subsequent 2000 film starring Christian Bale and the 2016 Broadway musical with Benjamin Walker, the last of which features Lewis’s “Hip to Be Square.”

In 1985, Huey Lewis and the News garnered their sole Grammy, winning Best Music Video, Long Form for the single “The Heart of Rock and Roll.” Unfortunately, the new Broadway musical The Heart of Rock and Roll was snubbed by the Tonys and received a lone Drama Desk nomination, for Lorin Latarro’s delightful choreography. But don’t let that stop you from seeing this superfun show, now running at the James Earl Jones Theatre.

Jonathan A. Abrams’s book skirts around clichés in telling the story of Bobby Stivic (Corey Cott), a blue-collar dreamer who is forced to choose between a stable, professional career and playing in a band. When Bobby gets fired from his job on the factory floor of the family-run, Milwaukee-based Stone Box Co., which makes shipping supplies (boxes, tape, packing peanuts, bubble wrap), for cutting a bad deal with a stereo company in order to give every employee a Walkman to help boost productivity, he decides he has to make it right. He heads off to a conference in Chicago where he believes he will be able to get the keynote speaker, Swedish furniture mogul Otto Fjord (Orville Mendoza), to become a client.

Tough HR head Roz (Tamika Lawrence), the easygoing Mr. Stone (John Dossett), and his extremely efficient workaholic daughter, Cassandra (McKenzie Kurtz), see Bobby at the trade show, and, discovering that he is representing the company he no longer works for, are not exactly pleased. But when the ever-charismatic Bobby manages to get a meeting with Fjord — in the hotel sauna — Stone considers giving Bobby another chance.

Meanwhile, Bobby’s former bandmates and childhood friends, optimistic guitarist JJ (Raymond J. Lee), realistic drummer Eli (John-Michael Lyles), and fatalistic bassist Glenn (F. Michael Haynie), suddenly snag a gig that could put them on the map, but they need their lead singer and songwriter to return in order to have any potential shot at the big time. And Bobby and Cassandra might have to answer the big question: Do you believe in love? as her high school sweetheart, the smarmy, WASPy Tucker (Billy Harrigan Tighe), is back in town.

Director Gordon Greenberg (Working, Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors) strings it all together like a series of interrelated music videos, except with more depth — but not too much — with the help of Japhy Weideman’s lighting and John Shivers’s sound. Just because you don’t have Huey Lewis and the News on your digital playlist doesn’t mean you won’t be charmed by the poppy songs, performed by a crack eight-piece band. Music supervisor Brian Usifer’s arrangements and orchestrations stay true to the original tunes without getting Broadway-fied under Will Van Dyke’s solid musical direction. There are plenty of familiar hits (“If This Is It,” “Workin’ for a Livin’,” “I Want a New Drug,” “The Power of Love”) along with a new song written for the musical, “Be Somebody,” which is, well, a bit too square.

Derek McLane’s sets (with backdrops that pay homage to the game Connect Four), Jen Caprio’s costumes, and Nikiya Mathis’s hair, wigs, and makeup keep you firmly in 1987 middle America, from the factory to a nightclub to the convention, where Stone’s booth includes such signs as “Too Cool to Spool,” a riff on “Hip to Be Square.” Latarro wonderfully integrates her choreography into parts of the set, using a conveyor roller, lockers, and, most ingeniously, bubble wrap. (Now, that’s tap dancing!)

The Tucker subplot is stale from the get-go, but just about everything else succeeds, especially the various relationships: between father and daughter, bandmates, potential lovers, and ex-employee and HR diva. Lawrence has a field day as Roz, delivering one of the show’s best lines: “If you’re having a business meeting without your clothes on, then HR better be present.” Dossett is heartwarming as Stone, who evokes some of the dads in the 1980s John Hughes movies. Cott, looking like a young Hugh Jackman, is endearing as Bobby, who just wants everyone around him to be happy. And Kurtz is hilarious as the bumbling, adorable Cassandra, her facial gestures alone worth the price of admission.

“New York, New York / Is it everything they say,” JJ sings in the title song. In the case of The Heart of Rock and Roll on Broadway, it most assuredly is.

HELL’S KITCHEN
Shubert Theatre
225 West Forty-Fourth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 19, $74-$318
www.hellskitchen.com

When Hell’s Kitchen made its world premiere this past winter at the Public, there was something missing. In my review, I noted, “With some significant tweaking, Hell’s Kitchen has the chance to be both a critical and popular hit on the big stage.” That’s exactly what has happened. (Note: Much of that original review is repeated verbatim below, with some tweaks to emphasize how the Broadway production has improved.)

On Broadway at the Shubert, the semiautobiographical musical, inspired by the life of Alicia Keys — the singer-songwriter, producer, and art collector who has won sixteen Grammys and has been nominated for two Emmys and one Tony — is now a much tighter, fresher coming-of-age story set in mid-1990s Manhattan, thanks to small changes in Kristoffer Diaz’s book. In her first professional role, Maleah Joi Moon makes an explosive Broadway debut as Ali, a seventeen-year-old girl living with her extremely protective single mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean), in a one-bedroom apartment “on the forty-second floor of a forty-four-story building on Forty-Third Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, right in the heart of the neighborhood some people know as Hell’s Kitchen.” The building is designated as artist housing, and it’s filled with a bevy of artists, including a trumpeter on thirty-two, a dance class on twenty-seven, opera singers on seventeen, poets on nine, painters on eight, a string section on seven through four, and a gospel pianist in the Ellington Room on the ground floor.

It’s summer, and Ali has decided it’s time for her to get busy with the older Knuck (Chris Lee), who drums on buckets in the street with his friends Q (Jakeim Hart) and Riq (Lamont Walker II). Ali and her homegirls, Jessica (Jackie Leon) and Tiny (Vanessa Ferguson), are sure the men are up to no good, but as Ali says, “We need that trouble in our lives.”

That’s the last thing Jersey wants for her daughter, so she enlists her besties, Millie (Mariand Torres) and Crystal (Crystal Monee Hall), and jovial doorman Ray (Chad Carstarphen) to keep an eye on Ali’s comings and goings. Jersey does not want what happened to her — an early, unwanted pregnancy by an unreliable man, a jazz musician named Davis (Brandon Victor Dixon) — to happen to her stubborn daughter.

As she prepares for her potential sexual awakening, Ali becomes intrigued by Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis), the elderly woman who plays the piano in the Ellington Room and soon becomes Ali’s mentor. But the trouble that Ali soon encounters is not the trouble she needs.

Hell’s Kitchen is structured around two dozen Keys songs, from such albums as 2001’s Songs in A Minor, 2003’s The Diary of Alicia Keys, 2007’s As I Am, 2012’s Girl on Fire, 2020’s Alicia, and 2021’s Keys, and three new tunes written specifically for the show, “The River,” “Seventeen,” and “Kaleidoscope.” The orchestrations by Tom Kitt and Adam Blackstone are lively, and Camille A. Brown’s choreography captures the energy of the street on Robert Brill’s scaffold-laden set, enhanced by projections of the neighborhood by Peter Nigrini. The naturalistic costumes are by Dede Ayite, with lively lighting by Natasha Katz and spirited sound by Gareth Owen.

The show is directed with a vibrant sense of urgency by Tony nominee Michael Greif (Dear Evan Hansen, Next to Normal), even more exciting with Diaz’s (The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, Welcome to Arroyo’s) revised book. Moon is magnetic as Ali; you can’t take your eyes off her for even a second. Tony nominee Bean (Mr. Saturday Night, Waitress) is engaging as the overwrought mother, shaking things up with “Pawn It All,” while Obie winner Lewis (Dreamgirls, Ain’t Misbehavin’) nearly steals the show as Miss Liza Jane, channeling Maya Angelou when she says such lines as “I will not allow you to let the pain win,” then bringing down the house with “Perfect Way to Die.” Lee (Hamilton) has just the right hesitation as Knuck, acknowledging the obstacles he faces every step of the way, and Carstarphen (Between the Bars, Neon Baby) is eminently likable as the adorable doorman.

Just as you don’t have to be a Huey Lewis fan to enjoy The Heart of Rock and Roll, you don’t have be an Alicia Keys devotee to get swept away by Hell’s Kitchen. In both cases, it’s well worth putting another dime (or more) in the jukebox, baby.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]