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Mickey Jo
Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you are listening on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I'm a professional theatre critic here on social media and today we're going to be talking all about the multi Tony award winning play Stereophonic, which began its life off Broadway, subsequently transferred to the Golden Theatre on Broadway and is now finally making its West End debut. But now that it is, is it proving just too much of a good thing for British audiences? AKA what I mean by that is at 3 hours and 15min total is this epic rock and roll play by David Ajmi simply too long? That is just one of the questions that we'll be answering as I bring you my full review of this play. Now I've reviewed Stereophonic before. I talked about it when I went to go and see the show on Broadway. I haven't checked back in with that review before sitting down to film this one, so feel free to compare and contrast. I dare say my feelings about it are going to be very similar. I don't feel as though my understanding of the piece has evolved considerably. I loved it then, I love it now. I do think because there is just so much of it that you g and insight. And I'm also really excited to talk to you about the new performances because some of the existing New York cast members have transferred with the production, but they are joined by some brand new British cast members, meaning that the company of the West End production is much like the band that is depicting a hybrid between British and American performers. But I'm getting just a little ahead of myself. Before I talk to you about this brilliant play, I would love to know what you think. If you have seen Stereophonic in the West End, let us all know your thoughts in the comments section down below. And as always, if you enjoy listening to my thoughts, make sure you're subscribed right here on YouTube. Turn on those notifications so that you don't miss any of my upcoming reviews or other theater themed videos or go follow me on podcast platforms. In the meantime, here they are, my thoughts on the West End production of Stereophonic. So a little bit of background first of all about what this play actually is. It's been written by David Ajmi and it's about a fictional band who are a British American hybrid rock band. And at the point that we are meeting them, they have already released their first studio album and they are in the process of recording their second, a process that we quickly come to understand is a slightly artistically frustrating one. And the impression that we quickly get is that this is a band simultaneously on the precipice of enormous success, as well as being on the brink of complete collapse because of a lot of interpersonal drama and artistic conflict and romantic conflict. There are egos at play, there are complicated power dynamics, there are insecurities. There are substance abuse issues. And as we're hearing about their first album and one particular song from that album, re entering the charts and becoming very successful and propelling them to even more fame, we are seeing them struggle to put this whole album together. An album that we come to understand is full of really fantastic material. I should add that there is music featured in the play. It has been composed by Arcade Fire alumnus Will Butler. It is extraordinary. It is so, so great. You can listen to the full recordings of many of these songs. Even though we only hear a couple of songs in their entirety perform within the play, the rest we hear as isolated recorded vocal lines or in fractured segments when they're trying to record things over and over and over again and having issues with tempos or having issues with microphones on specific parts of the drums, etc. All sorts of agonizing, teething problems. But all of the music that we do get to hear is so strikingly reminiscent of the rock and roll of the 1970s, but it also feels contemporary. And there is such a cleverness to the way that it's been written as well, because it speaks lines of dialogue within the script. I mentioned the tempo problem that they have with a particular song. And Simon, the drummer, who is reluctant to use a click track, is criticized for playing the song at the incorrect speed, making it sound like a polka. And so Will Butler has composed music here in conjunction with Justin Craig, with whom he also did the orchestrations that makes it sound at the wrong speed, like a polka. And before I carry on to talk about the brilliance of the writing by David Ajmee. The music is such an essential component to this story because it acts as a justification of their talent and of their brilliance. If we didn't have these moments of really satisfying inspiration and coming together, there's one particular section in which they are reorchestrating a song on the fly and rearranging exactly how it might work and then performing it the whole way through, leaving the studio technicians and the audience sort of awestruck. And without, I think, that evidence of their talent and the possibility of what they can actually achieve together as this group, then they would just seem like a dysfunction mess. And you would simply root for their demise. You would think that there's no reason these people ought to be collaborative musicians. The other key facet of this being that all of these actors are playing their own instruments, are actually singing. When the character of Diana, who is principally the lead vocalist of the group, is criticized by her partner Peter, who becomes a very dominant creative force and sort of puts himself in charge of the recording process as the album's producer, when he tells her that he doesn't believe that she's capable of singing a particular section of a song, she then does so very satisfyingly. And it's those kind of winning moments that we wouldn't get if music wasn't a part of this. And it would feel empty as well if they were just talking about the songs the whole time. We didn't really get to hear them. And there's also, I think, a conversation to be had about the role of the songs and the music dramatically allowing it to find the kind of a catharsis that a lot of musical theater pieces might. The songs aren't narrative as such. There's a couple of, like, profound and poetic musings that you could read into just a little bit. But for the most part, it's more about the way in which they are performed rather than what they're explicitly saying. And through that, sometimes characters are able to express angst and frustration through the music that they are singing. On other occasions, it flies entirely in the face of the emotion that they are experiencing. At one point, you have three characters whose relationship has become so fractured. I mean, really, it's between two of them, and the other person is just stuck in the middle. But they are singing a close little harmony section recorded in isolation. So we're just hearing three voices, acapella, trying to record this tight, proximal harmony. And in that moment, as they are singing, they are collaborative and they are entwined. Only between takes, they are screaming at each other. Now, let's talk a little bit about the story that David Ajmi is trying to tell with this brilliant play. And, you know, we're talking about the music industry, but also more broadly, we're just talking about the. Of making art and creating something in general and of collaboration. And you have these individuals who care so deeply about this and so profoundly about doing a good job with this, and it means so much to each of them, to the point that, you know, they are aware that they're damaging their personal lives. For many of them, as this process goes on and on, and on this recording session that was meant to conclude by the end of the month and ends up being this sprawling, unending thing that is still going months down the line as it continues. They have less and less of a life to look forward to outside of this music and outside of the recording studio, and it becomes the sole reason for their existence. I spoke a little recently with producer Sonja Friedman about what speaks to her about this play. And she talked about the messiness of trying to make art and these people with these damaged lives coming together and, you know, being tormented by the process, but refusing to stop until they get it right. Feeling as though they can't stop until they get it right. And there is a real quality of that within Stereophonic. Everyone is exhausted and frustrated and overwhelmed and sick of this thing that they're doing, but they are unable to stop themselves from persisting nonetheless. And again, what they are achieving with it painstakingly is remarkable. The music that they're producing is so fantastic to the extent that we hear brilliant songs recorded in the play and then, spoiler alert, by the end of the thing we hear in this throwaway line, that the majority of the music that we have heard recorded has actually been discarded from the final album. They talk about songs which have been cut because they're trying to trim it down to the length that it needs to be. And this, I think, is meant to be an indicator of the quality of the songs that did actually make it onto the album. But also I think it's meant to speak to the frustration of it all that, you know, they slaved over these songs which we heard, and almost everything that was presented within the play ended up being cut. And I think to a certain extent as well, it's also meant to make us feel a little bit frustrated. I feel frustrated about it anyway. Now, here's another thought as to why this play works as well as it does. It seems sort of revolutionary to be, you know, taking the dramatic focus into this kind of a setting. And it's been done on screen like Daisy Jones and the Six. Not something that I've watched, but I hear that there are, you know, kind of similarities with the story being told. But in terms of a play, to examine this kind of interpersonal drama within the context of a recording studio is quite novel. And yet I think there is something of a similarity between this and the traditional setting for this kind of an Angston discussion filled play, which would usually be arguments around a dinner table or a kitchen table. Right. If you think about your August Osage Counties. If you think about the most recent Pulitzer Prize winner purpose. If you think about your Arthur Millers and your Eugene o' Neill's. So often we're having arguments around dinner tables and there is a similarity here because there's no dinner table to be seen, but we are arguing around a mixing desk, a vintage 1970s mixing desk. And for the most part, when the most intense scenes are playing out, characters are sat around this mixing desk or feuding across it. And I think even though so much of this play feels so contemporary and so new and so forward thinking, it also retains that sort of a classic dynamic, albeit in a slightly different context. Then you have the inherent theatricality of this recording studio space, not just because performances are taking place, but because often we have the studio engineers listening in to conversations that are happening in the recording booth area, which is separated from them by a soundproof glass wall. Only they can choose to toggle up the volume or not and listen in on the conversations which are being had, which they occasionally do to comic effect. This positions them to be spectators and all the drama that is unfolding and we're watching them watching something else that's happening simultaneously. And that setting, I think, and this is bringing us towards a conversation about Daniel Orkin's brilliant direction. But it sets us up for so many really striking moments. You have Peter, the controlling member of the band, who I told you about, criticizing his partner, Diana, the vocalist from the mixing desk, as she is alone in the studio, represented there looking helpless, looking like a zoo animal in an enclosure, trying to hit this challenging note, while everyone watches her from the other side of the glass. And she is literally really just isolated there. You have a lot of striking moments when characters leave or enter that space. There is one brilliant visual of Simon, the drummer, watching Reg, the bass player, taking a lot of cocaine. He's watching from the recording area, sort of looking down on him from above like a disapproving parental figure. But to segue into a conversation about Daniel Orkin's direction, we are positioned as the audience to be utter flies on the wall. And the first time I saw this in New York, I was at the top of the theatre, at the back of the theatre, literally on a wall. And it felt as though I was pressed up against the side of this room, trying not to make a noise, because if I was breathing too loudly, then all of the musicians would realize that I was there amongst them. That's what this play feels like. There is such an immediacy and a raw honesty to the thing that's the way that it's been written. It is incredibly naturalistic. It does not pander whatsoever to its audience with any kind of a presentational or quality, which is a little to its detriment at the beginning. But we'll talk about that momentarily. But between David Ashmi's writing and Daniel Orkin's direction, you do have this sensation that you've just stumbled into a recording studio halfway through their day and you're just walking in on this clearly charged situation already in progress. Before I carry on, the brilliant set design that I've been telling you about is the work of David Zinn. I love the positioning of it all and how it directs our focus. I also love all of the 1970s rugs. But let's carry on a little bit and talk about the idea of whether or not this 3 hour and 50 minutes minute play is too long. So I am of the opinion that I don't really care about running times, honestly. I think if a play is good, then I'm never gonna resent too much of a good thing. And I say that as someone who has never been particularly great at moderation. But I don't understand criticism for something like six, the musical being too short. I don't understand the criticism for something like Stereophonic being too long. I also think the differ is whether or not it feels long. And that is something that I think is affecting this more so than anything else. I think 3 hours 15 of vital and necessary and compelling theater doesn't feel like 3 hours and 15. But therein may be the problem for British audiences. And there are longer plays. And I've seen Angels in America and I've seen the Inheritance and I've seen three act plays. And I think what makes them often feel a lot more manageable is where you put the breaks and where you put the intervals and the intermissions. And I still. There is a curiosity in my mind about whether or not Stereophonic, because structurally it's written, I believe, to be a four act play with those divided into two halves with one interval in the middle. I think when I originally saw this on Broadway, I had just seen another play, Joshua Harmon's Prayer for the French Republic. And that was a three act play with two separate ten minute intermissions. And I kind of wanted that to be the same thing that Stereophonic implemented. And I'm not convinced that there is a fantastic place to put an earlier first interval and break in the narrative. But I am curious about how that might work because I think the problem that people are having with this is that the start feels a little bit slow. And that's because of the deliberate naturalism and like I said, not pandering whatsoever to the audience. You don't have this quality of, you know, heavy handedly introducing these characters and setting things up before they arrive. We find out a little bit about Reg before we meet him, but for the most part we get to know everyone simply by watching them attentively. And attentively is how you have to engage with this play. Because there is so much detail in the conversations and in what is said and in what isn't said. You have to read between the lines here to understand the dynamics at play. And there's so many little important details that are said only once as a brief aside. And you find out about relationships that clearly sour and people who ended up seeing the other people. And little, like I said, tensions and frustrations within the group that can only really be attributed to one little earlier statement that it's important that you heard. You need to hear everything. And what makes that a little bit difficult at the beginning is you have this very naturalistic dialogue where people are speaking over each other at the start. And it's not very loud and declarative. It's quite conversational and soft spoken. And you have a little bit of chaos with this at the start. And I think that might make particularly a British audience just feel a little bit disengaged. Is there more material and stereophonic than there probably needs to be? Yes. And that's what, you know, prevents it from having that kind of a heavy handed quality because everything that arises does so naturally. And there's probably another hour that he could have written with all of these characters. Not everybody gets closure. You could keep going with this plot and find out what happened afterwards. There are scenes in the middle that could have been written as well. We could have ventured back before even the beginning of the thing. We are just encountering them during these particular moments as the timeline of the whole thing starts to increase cumulatively and we start to race into the future in a way that becomes, I think, deliberately hard for us to perceive. It feels like time is dilating a little bit. As you know, everyone is getting more maddened and sleep deprived and frustrated. So for me, I think stereophonic is pretty perfect as it is. I know that the first act is long. And if you were to and put together a version of this play that was the most engaging and the most crowd pleasing and reached out to its audience a little bit more Then you'd probably open with a recording session performance, you'd open with music. And Certainly the first 15 minutes would be very different because I think at the moment it's something that audiences have to really lean into. And that's the whole naturalistic, fly on the wall experience. You've walked into a room, it's not going to immediately be clear to you what's going on. You have to take a little bit of time to follow and understand. But it' the richer experience for doing that. If you can lean in, if you can meet this play where it is, then you will have a much more rewarding theatrical experience. I think so anyway. But almost everything that I've had to say about it thus far could also be applicable to the New York production that I saw on Broadway. Let's talk a little bit about what makes this new, which is the new cast. So, like I said, because we have three of the returning original company members from the US joined by four British performers, you now have this hybrid British American cast portraying this hybrid British American rock group in the 1970s. What's interesting about that is you have at least one American actor playing a British character, as well as two American actors playing American characters, two British actors playing British characters, and two British actors playing American characters. So it goes in all different directions. I want to talk first of all about one of those new British cast members, Jack Riddiford, who plays Peter, one of the American band members. He's this musical genius who plays all of these different instruments and he hears how he needs everything to be. But he is also hugely controlling. He has an ego, but beneath that, he has a vast ocean of insecurities that he projects onto other people. And nobody more so than his partner, Diana. He is very critical of her. He's sort of gaslighting her in terms of her writing music. He quite early on, as we're finding out about the the return of a song that she wrote to the top 40 and climbing back up the charts, we see him reacting in a way that is clearly resentful, where he just doesn't know what to say for an uncomfortably long amount of time in the midst of everybody else congratulating her. And it's also more complex than simply him being resentful of her success because, like I said, he has a great many insecurities here as well. He has this challenged relationship with his father and being made to feel in competition with his brother, who is an Olympic swimmer. We see the daddy issues really coming into fruition when he has this Almost Shakespearean, kind of a showdown with Simon, the drummer. And I feel like that dynamic and the slight sort of age gap between them feels even more pronounced in this production, where he looks to him as a sort of a father figure and resents being told what to do by him for that reason. But Jack plays this spiraling, hypocritical nightmare of a musical genius with a tremendous amount of sensitivity. At the show's launch, he spoke about how it had been conveyed to him. Peter's love language was, you know, going to people and saying, I want to make you better at what it is that you do, which is obviously incredibly toxic. But you can feel that coming through in his performance, that there is a care behind it, even if it's completely misplaced and completely misguided. But when we get to see him completely broken down and begging Diana to say the words that he needs to hear after the two of them have emotionally grown apart and started leading different lives, I mean, it's brilliant, brilliant work from him. So then, let's talk about Diana, then. Lucy Karchevsky plays this brilliant role. These, I thought, were some of the biggest shoes to fill after the Broadway production, simply because I enjoyed Sarah Pigeon's performance so, so much. But I really love what Lucy is doing with this character. I think in the first act, we see so many of the indicators of someone who is kind of being emotionally abused in the context of this relationship, and then later explodes into this defiant independence and almost the overcorrects, really. We see moments in the recording BO and with the meeting that they're having at the very end, where she's almost asserting herself a little too much in this collaborative forum because she refuses to make any more concessions to Peter specifically. But we understand it all because we've seen her so tormented by him and the relationship that the two of them managed to achieve, the intimacy and the volatility and just sort of the feeling of. Of magnetism between them is really brilliant. Lucy, also, like Sarah did before, has sings the role so, so brilliantly, has a voice that will have audiences walking out of the Duke of York's Theatre saying, why doesn't that girl have a breakaway pop album all of her own? She sounds so great on this, and I've said it before about this character, but the challenge of singing something and make it sound like you are cracking under pressure, and then sing it perfectly and do a perfect take afterwards, which is going to be recorded and played back subsequently. Amazing. Onto the cast members then, who have transferred from the New York production so you have Chris Stack playing the drummer, Simon. I really came to appreciate his presence and the function that he serves dramatically in this production in ways that I hadn't noticed before. I think he's an interesting one because he has his meltdown moment like just about everybody else on stage. But for so much of it, he is the voice of reason holding everything together. And he has some really funnier sides mixed in there as well. Well, and what I think is very interesting about Simon as a character is he, at the beginning of the thing, is the only one whose partner is not there. She's back home in the UK with the kids because she's not in the band. The band is made up of him. And at the beginning of the play, two other couples. And so his personal turmoil that's unfolding is unfolding far away, and people aren't hearing about it until, you know it's come to a breaking point. Whereas you can see the writing on the. The wall for the other couples in the room. But he's able to keep his cards a little closer to his chest. There's some really interesting things that happen with costuming with Simon. I mean, Enva Shakatash's costumes for everyone. All of these characters go on a journey and they're all so stylish and so familiar of the 1970s. I love all of these costumes to look at, but they also tell such a great story for these characters. You see Diana coming into her own independence and dressing in a way that feels more emboldened and feels more stylish as she's becoming successful. And the costuming underscores that rise to success and fame. Peter has a similar thing, but for him, it's clothing that denotes power and authority. As he's wearing these striking suits, Simon begins with a sense of power and control. And then as he is having his breakdown about the drums and the microphone microphones, we see him start to look a little bit more like a 1970s caveman. And then, you know, he comes back again at the end. He's had his moment, but then he returns to being the voice of reason. He's conducting this meeting with the very fractured band. At the very end of the players, they're discussing what they're going to do with this album and what track and which tracks are going to be cut. And there's this one excellent visual of him sat facing forwards, not making eye contact with anyone else in the room, but saying something bold that needed to be said, announcing this, and then discarding his cigarette ash to the side onto the carpet, wearing a waistcoat. It's such a powerful moment. Chris Tack does a great job and I have to say, does a very good British accent as well. Then you have Eli Gel, but in many ways the heart of Stereophonic as Grover, the lead. There's a name for what he does that he says multiple times, times during the play, but I forgot what it is. He is the technician recording the album. He is being assisted by another character whose name we learn is Charlie. We only hear that said once because he says it. He introduces himself when he's on the phone to somebody else in the studio. He says, hi, it's Charlie. But it seems as though nobody else other than presumably Grover actually knows his name. He's portrayed by Andrew R. Butler, who. Who is hysterically funny, both in his line deliveries and in his physicality. But what Eli is doing is so interesting. And the layers that he brings to Grover, the most obvious of which is this imposter syndrome that he is contending with, we find out fairly early on that he has inflated his resume and his CV in order to gain access into the room, basically. And he said that he recorded for the Eagles and he was involved in the process, but he's just sort of contorted the truth a little bit in order to get this job. And he's very at peace with that until they come to find out that Columbia has, I. I think, doubled the budget for the recording. And he then becomes immediately very stressed about the scale of the whole thing. And Eli as Grover is a really fantastic thermometer for the temperature of the play, because as we climb towards this emotional boiling point, we see him getting more and more stressed and more and more tense and sleep deprived. At the climax of this for him, he has this extraordinary breakdown, which is both dramatic and very funny, but he also has some really thoughtful and exposing scenes with the character of Holly, played by Nia Tal, who I would love to tell you about next. Now, Holly is not a character who I previously thought was particularly central to the piece. I always thought that this was really a Peter and Diana play, But with the London production, Nia makes Holly such a powerful and compelling character that she feels as much at the center of the thing as anybody else. But Holly as a character is brilliantly indicative of the power dia dynamics at play here. Peter yells at everybody and he yells at Grover, and he yells at Diana, and she confides in Holly, and Holly tries to support her. And Holly and Reg are fighting, and Holly tries to go to Simon. But the only Person who it feels like Holly is able to yell at is Grover. So Grover ends up on the receiving end of sort of unnecessary screams from Holly at one point. But they also have this fascinating sort of a semi flirtation and it feels, feels like under different circumstances there could possibly be an attraction and a relationship there. There's some very personally revealing sections of the text for her. She talks about her feelings about romance and about sex and about masculinity and her indifference towards Marlon Brando as she's recalling the film in which she saw one of the most striking erotic scenes that she's ever seen. And that's a really interesting scene and there's a lot that you can can choose to interpret from it, as is her earlier conversation with Diana in which she's recalling her background as a church organist and how she was referred to as the little shy girl. It feels in many ways that she never really gets the same kind of emancipation as Diana does that she might deserve in the play. And there's this really interesting body language between the two of them when Diana eventually tells her that she is pursuing a solo album, but that that doesn't necessarily mean that she is going to leave the band. And the two of them have a hug indicating the friendship that will endure. But Holly enacts a sort of a boundary because she stops her hugging her back that much and then she leaves with a lot still unsaid. I just think Nia's performance in this is so emotionally extraordinary, but still as with everything else, so natural, so believable, so authentic. She's one wonderful in this. And opposite her you have Zachary Hart as Reg, perhaps one of the showiest roles in the play. This was a Tony Award winning role on Broadway. And I love that Zachary is performing this with a regional British accent because I feel like that speaks to a lot of classic British music history. But also this is a character who I think is very representative of the plight of celebrity and of the successful musician. You know, he keeps trying to reinvent himself and look, looking for outside inspiration rather than really addressing his key character flaws. When we first meet Reg at the beginning of the play, he is drunk still from the night before. We hear that he has been keeping everyone awake all night, smashing plates and he is taking huge amounts of cocaine. This has put a significant strain on his relationship with Holly. And of course later when he tries to clean up his act, he has reinvented himself and instantly become an all knowing guru capable of dispensing life advice to everybody else around him. As he tries to tell Grover, you know, that he is living too much for his work. Grover, who at this point is just trying to get this album finished for all of these nightmare musicians. But Zachary finds every single bit of brilliance of the writing of this character. He is funny, he is weirdly endearing at the beginning while still being, you know, so clearly troubled and full of his own demons. You see the tension, particularly between him and Peter. You see the closeness between him and Simon. It's the relationships that they really get right in this production. And you understand what it is that everyone means to each other and those that are slightly more strained and those that are more important and the ebbing and flowing between him and Holly is so brilliantly played here. Everyone is doing a fantastic, fantastic job in this play. I think it's been superbly well cast and it really does, like I said multiple times, gain something from bringing together some previous and some new performers from either side of the Atlantic. I think that gives it a really exciting quality. Which brings me to the end of my thoughts about Stereophonic in the West End. Yes, it is three hours and 15 minutes, but it is some of my favorite hours that I have spent in a theater. I've already seen the West End production twice. I went just after opening and I also saw the first preview performance, I dare say might go and see it again while it is in London. They had been doing a under 30s ticket offer so check to see if there is still any availability there. I would love to hear about young people going to see Stereophonic. I think that would be so cool and I think it's just a cool play. I think we don't get a lot of pieces of theatre like this in the UK that feel very New York, that feel very downtown New York and forward thinking and edgy and rock and roll and you know, it's the kind of stories that we see more on screen. I think it's really cool to see a story like this on stage. And if you don't believe me, go and check it out for yourself and go and listen to the music as well. Because if you listen to that beforehand, there's no spoilers whatsoever in listening to the music. But if you listen to that and then go and see the play, then it's like you're watching this blistering documentary about your favorite band that never existed. Anyway, thank you so much for listening to my thoughts about the West End production of Stereophonic, currently running at the Duke of York's Theatre in London. As always, I would love to know what you thought. If you have seen this production in the West End, let us all know in the comments section down below. Thank you so much for listening to my review. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.