Photo by Isaac Mishkit.
Presented by Seacoast Repertory Theatre
Book by Chris D’Arienzo
Arrangements and orchestrations by Ethan Popp
Direction by Alyssa Dumas
Music Direction by Andrew Strout
Choreography by Alyssa Dumas and Dargan Cole
Featuring Jared LeMay, Sophie Mings, Christopher Hobson, Jamie Bradley, Michelle Faria, Tobin Moss, Spencer “Skip” Stewart, Sean Mullaney, Alexandra Mullaney, Sieglinda Fox, Michael Thompson, Dargan Cole, Hadley Withington, Heather Conti-Clark, Briar MacDonald, Finn Graff, Max Cavanaugh, Robert Fabricio Armstrong, and Shaina Schwartz
July 18 – September 8, 2024
Seacoast Rep.
125 Bow St.
Portsmouth, NH 03801
Review by Craig Idlebrook
PORTSMOUTH, New Hampshire — The production team of the Seacoast Repertory Theatre likely faced a dilemma when considering to stage Rock of Ages, the big-hair-metal jukebox musical. The theater is small and intimate, with limited seating surrounding the stage on three sides. How, in this environment do you stage a musical in which the musical genre calls for soaring guitar solos and high notes belted to the rafters? Do you pull back to fit the space or do you say, “(bleep) it, let’s turn it up to 11?”
Luckily, this production chose the latter, wisely deciding that many theatergoers misspent their youth playing metal so loudly on Walkman cassette players that all they could hear afterwards was ringing sounds. Like Grease before it, the only way this nostalgia trip works is by going full tilt.
Writer Chris D’Arienzo throws together the bare bones of a story and stretches it just enough to justify the rollicking good-time music: boy meets girl in the City of Angels, both with big dreams to make it big in the height of the hair metal scene. Just for good measure, there’s also a subplot in which the youth gone wild must band together to save a storied club from seemingly evil developers. This is all just window dressing for simple, driving music that makes you want to make devil horns with your fingers and then pump your fists to the beat.
Weirdly, for a show hyper-focused in one point in time in pop culture, the jukebox selection for this musical can sometimes be all over the place, likely because of the vagaries of copyright negotiations. There are raucous hits from Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, Poison, and Def Leppard, to be sure. However, there also curiously are selections from REO Speedwagon and Styx, the former which many hard rockers of the time would have rolled their eyes about and the latter which seemed ancient for the LA rock scene. My 1987-pre-teen snobbery aside, each song is well placed to propel the action forward, and to make my contemporaries in the crowd sing along and tap their feet.
Overall, the cast is strong and buys into the over-the-top ethos of the musical. The characters are thinly drawn, but must be big, and the cast commits to the task. Unfortunately, their deliveries in the service of this sometimes made the lines themselves illegible, at least to those of us who blared our Walkmans.
There were moments when it felt like the show and the music were a runaway train the cast was trying desperately to cling onto. That led to a few key missed beats in the vocal delivery of some showstopping songs, but only the big hair purists of the crowd would have noticed, and even fewer of this subgroup likely would have cared. The cast were most endearing, however, when they would pause the action to deliver asides to the audience or play along when the raucous crowd shouted out to them.
It was hard for individual cast members to stand out amidst the absurd and frenetic action on stage, but special mention should be given to Sophie Mings (Sherrie) and Spencer “Skip” Stewart (Franz). Mings is given a thankless role of a starry-eyed love interest, but her flawless vocals and commitment to the physicality of her role help us to connect with the character and stay rooted in the action.
For his part, Stewart is given the task of playing an absurdly drawn European character, one who is conflicted about the plans to demolish a club. It is a character we could easily have dismissed as two-dimensional, but Stewart draws us in with dancer-level physical comedy and a surprisingly vulnerable performance.
Perhaps the unsung hero of this production is the large stage design production team, which was essential to the fundamental world-building for the silly action on stage. One can practically feel the grime of the walls on The Bourbon Room, especially in a pivotal-and-degrading bathroom sex scene. It is as if our young heroes are locked in a dungeon and the only way out is to hit that high note just as the guitar crescendos.
