Rock ‘n’ Roll

MARX BROTHER Kane agrees to go on the record.

Photo: Michael Brosilow

Let it not go unobserved just because the man is uncommonly scholarly by modern theater standards: Tom Stoppard has written a jukebox musical.

Forgive the downgrading of The Coast of Utopia’s playwright into the same crude genre that gave us Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys, but his 2006 play—about communism in the former Czechoslovakia and breast cancer and the verses of Sappho and the dangers of tabloid journalism and the superior early years of Pink Floyd and other stuff—was fathered in the same manner as karaoke extravaganzas. It was written to fit a preexisting song catalog.

Though he’s admirably resisted it since 1966, when he penned the clever Hamlet riff Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard has finally succumbed to the urge to squeeze his own generational journey through the filter of its pop music. Certainly his story about a Marxist professor who lives safely in academia and his activist pupil who lives in reality is densely layered with the kind of political theorizing, classical allusions, dogged history and immodest academic posturing that has always made you attracted to or repelled by Stoppard. But the task he set for himself here is no different than the one faced by the creators of Forever Plaid: devising a narrative between songs already playing on heavy rotation in the collective consciousness.

After feeling left out in the cold by his intellectually aggressive, emotionally impenetrable works like Travesties and Jumpers, I was excited to encounter a more relatable Stoppard, one who’s less interested in distancing audiences from his talent with his show-off knowledge of Tristan Tzara than inviting them toward it with his shared love of the Rolling Stones.

But even in the handsome Chicago debut Charlie Newell has directed for the Goodman—his simple staging focuses mainly on actors and words, giving the text no place to hide—Rock ‘n’ Roll comes off like so many American plays about the baby-boomer experience of the same era. Being part of the revolution was great, it seems—probably more noble than anything you’re up to now, that’s for sure—and if we understood their music better, man, we’d totally get where they were coming from. This uncommonly romantic Stoppard with watercolor memories of the struggle, heightened by Christopher Akerlind’s gorgeous stadium lighting, isn’t unwelcome. It’s merely disappointing that, when he changed clothes for the evening, Stoppard left his ability to weave history into drama in his safety-pinned jeans.

Beginning in 1968, Rock ‘n’ Roll examines a rigid-minded Cambridge professor of Marxism; his cancer-ridden, Sapphic-scholar wife; and his shaggy Czech pupil who’s obsessed with a band called the Plastic People of the Universe and their symbolic role in resisting the Soviet occupation of his homeland. As two decades pass, said wife gets eaten by her disease and ignored by her husband while her daughter grows into a functional flower child (Fisher plays both women with exceptional care). The young Marxist briefly goes to prison, gets his cherished record collection trashed and becomes a mellow bakery lackey (Kane’s Czech accent is a hair ominous, but his unclichéd transition from a wild political animal to a tamed, short-haired one is a significant accomplishment). And the tough codger prof calcifies into a cranky, embittered gentry pillar who never experienced the unpleasantness of acting on his convictions. (Yoakam decks this character in appropriate stoicism.)

There’s a rich history lesson in this material, one that it would behoove Americans schooled exclusively in E! True Hollywood Story–style history to observe. But in an uncharacteristically humorless move for Stoppard, the overlong first act is packed not with eggheaded epigrams to make the well-informed chuckle, but earnest and didactic arguments about Czech politics you might expect from an angry-young-man playwright. Watching it doesn’t require the same attention span as his hyperconnected matrix plays like Arcadia, but it’s still often boring.

Between scenes, Ray Nardelli and Josh Horvath’s sound design saturates us with the strains of Syd Barrett and Brian Wilson; it’s so good it accidentally takes on the qualities of a roof-raising number from Smokey Joe’s Café, sending our blood pumping only to have it stopped by contextual narration. Yes, Stoppard’s context for the music, much like half the characters he remembers from the era, is high. But it can’t shake off the feeling that the characters are there simply to connect the dots between the playwright’s favorite songs. Although it seems strange to level this claim against our most bookish playwright, the trouble with Rock ‘n’ Roll is the book.

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