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Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Times
I've just seen the two best hours of theatre this year
I've just seen two of the best hours of theatre of the year. Does it matter that they were preceded by another hour of theatre that took its own sweet time? For a while I was worried that no show could handle the weight of expectations that Stereophonic brings with it from Broadway: a New York Times review dubbing it 'a must-see American classic' and the most Tony nominations so far for a nonmusical. Let alone one as self-styled and slow-boiled as David Adjmi's fly-on-the-wall, three-hour play about a Fleetwood Mac-like Anglo-American band taking a year, from 1976 to 1977, to make their soft-rock masterpiece in a Californian recording studio. I can forgive a stodgy opening more than a fudged ending, though. Judge Ibsen by only his first scenes — often as not, a pair of servants filling each other in on who the other characters are — and you would never get his greatness. If I'd left the final Sondheim musical Here We Are (at the National until June 28) at the interval, before its wonky but wonderful second act, I'd be convinced it was a glib takedown of Manhattan manners. The first hour-plus of the new Mission: Impossible film is largely people spouting grave exposition to each other indoors — but the last hour has a cool bit in a submarine, and a way-cool bit with biplanes, so all is forgiven. The gurulike Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie insists his payoff only works because of all that no-action set-up. I'm not convinced, but I do wonder, looking back at Stereophonic, how much the extraordinary emotional detonations of its final half owe something to its rambling introduction. Slowly but surely we get to know this fictional band's fractious, talented pair of couples and their peace-making drummer. We see them coerce, clash, kiss, yack on, and now and then make beautiful music together. • The best shows in London and the UK to book now Part of you wants to go in to remix the thing — trim bits here, add more ambiguity there. But then, as you imagine yourself in the same wood-panelled control room as the two hairy engineers listening in, these meltdowns and epiphanies start to feel thrillingly intimate. One late scene has heinous insults being thrown one second, heavenly harmonies being sung the next. It's a neat gag and a sharp insight into the paradoxes of making things. It's the band's search for perfection that is the making and breaking of them. Six days on a drum sound. A song you see the guitarist Peter take from good to great as he rearranges it while the band plays it. Amid a strong cast, Jack Riddiford as Peter wields his American accent, instrument and undiplomatic insights with utter authority. • Read more theatre reviews, guides and interviews The director David Aukin makes it all plausible and propulsive. The designer David Zinn makes that studio so real you feel you could lean forward and operate the faders yourself. Could they have got to the great stuff an easier way? Sure, in a perfect world. Yet Adjmi has an angle on perfection — that it's less important than something that's alive, that makes you feel — just as he has an angle on relationships and creativity, and the mix of the heartfelt and the considered that both need. Stereophonic doesn't rush. Yet it's so absorbing, affecting and amusing I'd see it again in a heartbeat. ★★★★☆Duke of York's Theatre, London What have you enjoyed at the theatre recently? Let us know in the comments below and follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
Time Out
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Stereophonic
Stereophonic playwright David Adjmi recently wrote an article for a major British newspaper in which he waxed effusively about how his Broadway smash had been inspired by the band Led Zeppelin. I wonder if his lawyer was holding a gun to his head as he wrote it, because while the Zep may have been a tertiary influence, Stereophonic is very very very very very very very clearly about Fleetwood Mac. There are Fleetwood Mac fan conventions less about Fleetwood Mac. Hell, there are incarnations of Fleetwood Mac that have been less about Fleetwood Mac. Specifically, it's a lightly fictionalised account of the recording of the Anglo-American band's mega-selling Rumours album, and while not every detail is the same, many are identical, from the cities it was recorded in (Sausalito then LA) to the gender, nationality and internal-relationship makeup of the band, to details like female members 'Holly' (aka Christine McVie) and 'Diana' (aka Stevie Nicks) moving out out the studio accommodation they were sharing with the band's menfolk in favour of their own condominiums. Which l hasten to say is all to the good, even if it frequently feels like a miracle that Stereophonic has stormed Broadway – becoming the most Tony-nominated play of all time – without being derailed by legal issues (though there is a lawsuit against it from Rumours producer Ken Caillet, who has accused Adjmi of ripping off his memoir). Of course, it is a great subject for a play. The story of how erstwhile blues noodlers Fleetwood Mac recorded one of the greatest pop albums in history, while breaking up with each other, while on drugs isn't simply a bit of pop trivia: it's a parable on the nature of the creative process. It's an incredibly tricky story to tell in a way that doesn't come across all VH1 Behind the Music. But Stereophonic carries it off spectacularly well. For starters, the veil of fiction allows Adjmi to portray Peter (Jack Riffiford, basically Lindsay Buckingham) and Reg (Zachary Hart, basically John McVie) as catastrophic fuck ups - the former toxic and controlling, the latter addled and out of control. The reason biographical musicals are uniformly terrible is that the musicians or their estate have to sign the content off before they'll allow their songs to be used, resulting in tediously flattering portraits. That does not happen here. For all their faults it's a pleasure spending time with these fuck ups And then there are the songs by erstwhile Arcade Fire man Will Butler. They don't sound anything like Fleetwood Mac really: at a pinch you could argue they sound like Arcade Fire gone '70s soft rock. The lyrics don't have the stinging rawness of Rumours – it would be clunky cosplay to try and write a song like 'Go Your Own Way' for this project. But they're rousing, emotional, layered tunes, written for a band with the same makeup of singers and instrumentalists as Fleetwood Mac, performed live by the cast. There's a notable scene in which the band go through endless takes of a track called 'Masquerade': spoiler etc, but the scene finally ends with them getting it right – the scene would fall flat if it wasn't a good song. So no, Butler hasn't written Rumours II, or even tried. But Daniel Aukin's production hinges on the songs written for it being good enough to feel credible, which is pretty audacious. Structurally, it's a three-and-a-bit-hour interrogation of the creative process that features little more than the band chatting to each other or recording. Set solely in a windowless studio, director Aukin has supreme confidence in the play's pacing and rhythms. There is a lot – like a lot – of fannying around over drum sounds and guitar tones, but the play leads us to the right psychological space to understand that there's much more to this than musos muso-ing. A blizzard of coke, exhaustion, the enormous pressure to follow up their previous album, and of course cataclysmic inter-band tensions all go some way to explain why the band and their affable engineers Grover (Eli Gelb) and Charlie (Andrew R Butler) find themselves agonising over every detail. There is a lot about gender and power here. If the broad brushstroke picture is 'band makes an album', the more nuanced one is 'two talented women try to assert themselves in a toxic male-dominated creative environment'. Both Holly (Nia Towle) and Diana (Lucy Karczewski) know their worth. But Holly has to negotiate the broken heart of her ex, Reg, who has pretty much fallen apart after she dumped him and needs to be looked after if they're actually going to make this record. Meanwhile Diana has to deal with the brittle, self-absorbed musical virtuoso Peter, who she's still in a relationship with. His natural sense of perfectionism has been curdled by resentment over Diana's rising star status in the band, and his many snarling putdowns of her work are deeply uncomfortable. Zoom in even closer, and it's the story of Diana stepping out from Peter's control – at the beginning she's subservient to him for the sake of keeping the peace, but she will soon reject this volcanically. It's worth stressing that Stereophonic is extremely entertaining, because it's a show about seven great characters, and the reason the characters are so great is largely because the IRL Fleetwood Mac are a great bunch of characters. For all their faults it's a pleasure spending time with these fuck ups, from Towle's tough, brassy Holly to Chris Stack's avuncular-but-edgy Simon (ie the Mick Fleetwood character). Knob twiddlers Grover and Charlie aren't based on famous people, but still counterbalance the story, a couple of guys who might have expected themselves to be out of their depth musically instead finding themselves totally stumped by the band's emotional problems If there's one thing beyond a degree of legal protection that Stereophonic obviously gains from not technically being about Fleetwood Mac, it's that it ends on a genuinely uncertain note, and not with, I dunno, the band slamming through 'The Chain' while stats about the album's colossal sales flash up. Was this tectonic creative process worth all the damage inflicted for the music it created? Rumours is so beloved now that it's hard to conclude the band should have actually sacked it off. And you'd probably say the same for the Stereophonic band to be honest. But without the quadrillions of sales and instantly recognisable tunes, the damage these people did to each other in the name of art is brought home with devastating eloquence.
Evening Standard
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
Stereophonic at Duke of York's: 'a fine-grained, audacious work'
The unnamed 1970s band in David Adjmi's acclaimed Broadway hit couldn't be more like Fleetwood Mac if they were called Meatwood Flack. Over the course of a year – and 195 minutes in real time – we watch the three Brits and two Americans, including two couples, fall out while trying to record an album fuelled by industrial quantities of booze, weed and cocaine. Two hapless and high sound engineers are our proxies, witnessing the carnage close up.
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stereophonic review – 70s band saga is an extraordinary, electrifying odyssey
If you've ever wanted to step into a 1970s recording studio, get to the Duke of York's pronto. Stereophonic's set designer David Zinn has rendered one meticulously, from the complex console and shabby furnishings of the mixing suite to the fully functioning recording booth it gazes upstage into. As the play's fictional band gathers behind the glass, the dramatic possibilities of their pressurised containment are immediate. David Adjmi's music-infused drama – songs by Will Butler of Arcade Fire – arrives from Broadway trailing a record number of Tony nominations for a play, and a now-settled lawsuit. Fleetwood Mac's erstwhile engineer felt the story too closely resembled the making of their best-known album. Rumours? Echoes, certainly. If you know the names Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, chances are you're going to read them in Peter, the band's controlling genius, and Diana, whose need for independence grows with her rising star. Their fellow bandmates are also under strain. Bass player Reg is feeding his addictions from a kilo-bag of cocaine: as the band approaches its chart-topping breakthrough, he's on course for a breakdown. Zachary Hart's physical performance vibrates with tragicomic energy while Nia Towle, as his wife, Holly, absorbs the consequences ('It's a torture to need people'). Even Chris Stack's peace-making Simon is rendered hysterical by an infuriating buzz from his drums. Director Daniel Aukin's production is as exacting and truthful as the script itself. Sounds and voices overlap as mic channels are opened and closed; silences are underscored with boredom and exhaustion. In between the kit-tinkering and longueurs are moments of creative transcendence, including a late-night epiphany so electrifying that the sound waves will excite your internal organs. The cast, playing their own instruments, convince as an ensemble of longstanding and Lucy Karczewski, as Diana, has a voice that captivates even when it is exposed and cracking in a tense overdubbing session. Behind the mixing desk, Eli Gelb and Andrew Butler reprise their Broadway roles as inexperienced-but-ambitious engineer Grover and his oblivious sidekick Charlie. Grover may begin as a comic foil, desperate to avoid the whirlpool of angst, but like every character (including Jack Riddiford's infuriating Peter) he is empathically realised across the band's year-long odyssey. At more than three hours, the run time can feel as indulgent as one of Pink Floyd's longer tracks – but this is an extraordinary allegory for artistic perfectionism and the destruction it leaves in its wake. At the Duke of York's theatre, London until 11 October
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Stereophonic play review: Fleetwood Mac musical is a sensation
Stereophonic play review and star rating: ★★★★★ Stereophonic is a mighty test of endurance. At three-and-a-half hours, there are points in the Herculean one-hour-fifty-minute first act where the audience unanimously agree to give up and start chatting. I've never seen so many people escape to the loo. On this level, Stereophonic is one great meta remark about the agony of the creative process. About a fictitious band on the brink of stardom and their torturous journey to lay down a record in California in 1976, it might be one heck of an uncomfy watch – West End theatre seats aren't made for four-hour stints – but that's exactly how it's supposed to feel. Through extrapolating the fallouts, tender moments and disagreements that happen over a year of intense studio sessions, Stereophonic represents how good art can derive from obscenely dark places. As characters lackadaisically drift from studio to mixing room – the studio is at the back of the stage, the mixing room at the front – inter-group tensions are only ever a drumbeat away. Stereophonic seems inspired by the recording period of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, in which the band were torn apart by drug use and toxic relationships. Playwright David Adjjmi denies this, but the inter-group dynamics – an American-British couple and British drummer, as well as the play being set where the Rumours was recorded in Sausalito – bear too close a resemblance for the parallels not to be drawn. The notion of the tortured genius can seem trite, but writer Adjmi goes to incredible lengths to take these characters beyond cliche. Within David Zinn's claustrophobic studio set, the atmosphere is at a knife edge: drunken flirtations transform into bitter spats as the band, exasperated by the sight of one another, try to finish the record. As a viewer experience, it is sordidly watchable. Who will erupt next? Daniel Aukin's fluid, naturalistic direction is hypnotic. He finds depth from the whole cast, although Jack Riddiford is the most compelling as Peter, a guitarist and vocalist in the band whose talent is immense, yet he cannot control his incessant bursts of rage especially towards his girlfriend, vocalist Diana, given incredible stoicism by Lucy Karczewski. Zachary Hart must be dealing with nightly muscle spasms as drug-addled bassist Reg, who spends the duration of the show crumpled over in half, either in agony or to snort his next line. Nia Towle finds depth as Reg's exasperated wife Holly, and there's some incredible comic relief from beleaguered techy Grover, played by Eli Gelb, whose rose-tinted perspective fades after the 60th re-record. Andrew R Butler's sound engineer Charlie is the sort of great literary character conceived for very little else than slapstick and, blimey, do we need his energy amid all the meltdowns. As for the music, Arcade Fire's Will Butler has crafted the sort of immense piano rock melodies that could very well have ended up on an award-winning record for his own band. Occasionally they stop arguing long enough to break into spectacular musical interludes, with everything played live on stage. The songs sound so good there's nervous laughter from the audience. It's no wonder the 2024 Broadway production landed 13 Tony Award nominations, breaking the record of 12 previously set by race satire Slave Play. That the actual show-stopping music becomes almost a footnote is testament to how much there is say about this play. The Stereophonic play runs at the theatre until 20 September Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
