Jukebox Jack L. B. Gohn (bio) Juke Box e una magica invenzion. —Fred Buscaglione, Juke Box (1959) We love our jukebox musicals. Of the twenty musicals playing on Broadway as of this writing, six are of the jukebox genre, i.e., built around a preexisting pop or jazz songbook. At least three more are announced for the near future. This is noteworthy, considering that the whole notion of the jukebox musical has only been around for about thirty-five years (getting started about the time of Ain’t Misbehavin’), and there were years in which none of them premiered on Broadway until 2001. In retrospect the concept seems obvious: if the songbook is popular, the show putting it before the public comes, in effect, presold. And better yet, as long as the reprise of old hits is done well, the audience will probably go home the happier for having re-experienced something it already knows. The appetite for familiar tunes was pithily explained by comedian Chris Rock: “You are always going to love the music you were listening to when you first got laid.” With all respect, though, Rock stated it too narrowly; you are always going to love the music you were listening to in your musically and emotionally formative years whether you got laid or didn’t. A jukebox musical, whatever its dramatic blueprint, is first and foremost a delivery vehicle for that kind of nostalgia. This is a popular thing and to a great extent a good one. It is no easy trick, though. Almost every song tells some sort of story. The stories in most songs, even the simplest ones, imply surprisingly extensive contexts, and taken together, these contexts tangle rapidly. There exist only a few possible fundamental ways to minimize those tangles. The simplest way is to do what the creators of the songs themselves did: don’t try to tell a story, coherent or otherwise, just sing the songs. Recreate a concert, or, as Rain, the Beatles tribute show does, imagine what a Beatles concert would have been like if the Beatles had ever performed their later music live. The concert approach, however, is not all that clearly a theater performance. Theater generally implies at least some feint in the direction of narrative. Moreover, concerts lack a fourth wall, and I would contend that the fourth wall is key to what happens in true theater, even if the wall gets breached in the course of the proceedings. (More on this problem below.) A step toward true musical theater is a cabaret or revue performance, where the songs are presented as set-piece performances that make use of theatrical artifice. Perhaps cast members at times perform the role of audience, as happened in Ain’t Misbehavin’. Even here the theater label is iffy, [End Page 267] hinging perhaps on the hard-to-maintain distinction between performing the songs and enacting performers who are performing the songs. The line to theater proper is definitively crossed with what one might call the curated cabaret: where the “story” is the narration and perhaps a token reenactment of the audience’s love affair with the music in question, e.g., Beehive (an anthology of girl-group and female performer songs of the ’50s through the ’70s, in which the youthful cast—not actually veterans of that era, of course—narrate what it was like to be a young woman listening to that music). But on Broadway the two most usual approaches demand more theatricality still. One (call it the “original story” approach) simply makes a head-on attempt to fabricate an original narrative that threads all the songs together. The other retells the one narrative naturally connected with the music, the history of the creative talent behind the songs (“the biopic approach”). This review considers two exemplars of each. Rock of Ages (the Helen Hayes Theatre and on tour) tells an “original story.” Backing the action with one-time monster hits originally performed by bands from the great era of “hair rock” like Styx, Twisted Sister, and Starship, and performers like Pat Benatar and Jon Bon Jovi, the book presents a stock love story set against the struggle between...
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Sep 30, 2024
Yong-Hoon Kang 
Open Access