https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/06/stereophonic-theatre-review-cabaret
Published in the print edition of the
May 6, 2024, issue, with the headline “Night Music.”
The Theatre
“Stereophonic” and “Cabaret” Turn Up the Volume on Broadway
David Adjmi’s cult-hit play features seventies-inspired rock songs by Will Butler, while Eddie Redmayne presides over a demonic version of the Kit Kat Club.
By
Helen Shaw
April 26, 2024
When “
Stereophonic,” David Adjmi’s magnum opus about a nineteen-seventies rock band recording an album, débuted last year, at Playwrights Horizons, the Off Broadway venue gave over part of its lobby to a vintage-clothing shop. The theatre knew that spending more than three hours with Adjmi’s characters, each one gorgeously outfitted in the designer Enver Chakartash’s flowing bell-bottoms and deep-cut kimono tops, would turn the audience into groupies. It wouldn’t matter that those same characters had been tiresome or vain or careless with one another—the often dreamy, sometimes electrifying flower-rock songs, written by Will Butler (formerly of Arcade Fire), would make us imagine our own green selves up there, and want the velvet pants to prove it.
Now that “Stereophonic” has moved to Broadway’s Golden Theatre, you’ll have to source your own flares. But the show retains its immersive effect, thanks to Adjmi’s fly-on-the-wall hyperrealism, directed with an invisible hand by Daniel Aukin. The play takes place in a California recording studio in 1976 and 1977: David Zinn’s set consists of a cedar-toned control room, a warm domain of squashy floor pillows and assorted beanbags where the young engineer Grover (Eli Gelb) operates a huge mixing console and a twenty-four-track tape machine. Upstage is a soundproof recording booth, lit by Jiyoun Chang to seem as cold as a fish tank.
The part-British, part-American band, never named in Adjmi’s text, is essentially Fleetwood Mac, and the album we’re watching them craft in the course of an increasingly torturous year seems awfully similar to that band’s fraught masterpiece, “Rumours.” The British musicians are the drummer, Simon (Chris Stack); the bassist, Reg (Will Brill); and his keyboardist wife, Holly (Juliana Canfield). Two Americans have joined them on the path to superstardom: the Stevie Nicks-inflected lead singer, Diana (Sarah Pidgeon), and her domineering partner, a Lindsey Buckingham-ish guitarist and perfectionist producer named Peter (Tom Pecinka).
The biographical details, though, are Adjmi’s to do with as he pleases, and he focusses on the extraordinary intensity engendered by creative collaboration, desire, and tons of cocaine. He shows us Reg and Holly serially breaking up, as well as Peter and Diana’s toxic codependence. The term “stereophonic” refers to blending multiple transmission channels, which the play literally does: as Grover adjusts the faders on the console, we sometimes eavesdrop on private conversations in the booth. We hear murmurs, tape reels clicking, room tone, and then, BOOM BOOM BOOM, the bass drum pounding away behind our ribs.
Relationship catastrophes strike and recede, but the recording goes on. (Time may heal all wounds, but music preserves them.) Above all, the quintet appears to be, ruinously, in love with itself; even Grover almost falls into the band’s erotic, generative turbulence
. Only his assistant Charlie (Andrew R. Butler, who looks like a weed-dealing St. Jerome) maintains his distance, mostly because no one remembers his name. The audience should listen to him, though. “The room has a really nice decay,” Charlie says at one point, hearing some subtle, perhaps metaphorical, undertones we can’t catch.
Adjmi’s slow-moving quasi-documentary operates in several ways: it feeds our nostalgia for a time that seems, from this distance, promisingly free, and also our hunger for virtuosity attained through dogged work. The actors, all superb, play live, and Adjmi, whose script carefully notates their overlapping dialogue, orchestrates them beautifully. Brill’s unsteady Reg, for instance, who wobbles from booze to coke and back, sets the dramatic pace, and Diana’s excellence tugs at the fabric of the group’s cohesion: Pidgeon’s voice, finest when it’s roughest, sets her character apart as the one who could actually make a go of a solo career. As a leitmotif, we hear parts of a song Diana has written—“I’m in the bright light / Forgetting my name / The shadow of our lives / Familiar but strange”—from her initial, hesitant demo to the full band’s richly layered final version, assembled by an exhausted Grover. Adjmi asks whether it’s worth wrecking a few hearts to make a great song; he answers his own question in the end.
