“Stereophonic,” just released an original cast recording with a 14-song tracklist (listen below), which is not unusual for a Broadway musical, but not common for a Broadway play, which is how “Stereophonic is officially categorized. Indeed, “Stereophonic,” written by David Adjmi with original music by Will Butler, has already won awards for best play of the season (not best musical) from the Outer Critics Circle and the New York Drama Critics Circle, and has been nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play — one of its thirteen Tony nominations. That’s being touted as the most number of Tony nominations ever for a play — by which everybody means a non-musical. (There have been several Broadway musicals with more Tony nominations, “Hamilton” with sixteen, as well as “The Producers,” “Billy Elliott,” “Jagged Little Pill”) Two of the thirteen nominations for “Stereophonic” are for Best Score and Best Orchestrations – the only non-musical to be nominated in either of those categories this year.
How can a show put out an album with 14 songs — 41 minutes and 9 seconds of music — and still be considered a play? It’s easier when it runs close to three and a half hours (including an intermission), and (as I described it in my original review) it chronicles a year of recording studio sessions by the members of a popular (fictional) 1970s rock band, as they put together their latest album and have their ups and downs with one another.
I’ve now revisited “Stereophonic” twice since first attending a performance Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. I watched it again at Broadway’s John Golden Theater, and I liked it better — thanks in part to tangibly improved sound design, but also because my knowledge of what to expect somewhat curbed my impatience.
And then I listened to the album.
Much of the point of the play on stage are the many difficulties — technical, artistic, psychological, emotional — that hinder the creation of the (unnamed) album that the (unnamed) band is working on. There is much spoken dialogue, with the characters often engaging in technical/practical conversations, or just schmoozing The songs are mostly presented in oft-interrupted, repetitive snippets, sometimes not even played live, but as tinny recordings that the band is listening to. The five-member band is not performing for us; they’re performing for each other and the two sound engineers Charlie and Grover. It’s a full ninety minutes into the show before the band plays a song that’s sufficiently finished to get applause from the audience.
The actual experience of the play makes such marketing of it — such as this performance of “Masquerade” on The Tonight Show — feel somewhat misleading:
If “Stereophonic” on stage feels like a play full of deliberately banal exchanges intermittently interrupted by some music, “Stereophonic” the original cast recording makes the show feel like a…musical of terrifically tuneful rock songs, with a rare line or two of dialogue thrown in.
The cast recording directs our attention to the lyrics in a way that the stage show does not. The words in the first track, “Seven Roads,” lyrically reflect the relationship between Peter and Diana, the couple at the center of the band, that their dialogue does more bluntly and prosaically.
Peter:
Seven roads
I walked alone
seven stars
to guide me home
seven tears I counted in your eye when I told you all my seven lies
Peter and Diana:
When you’re near
I can’t breathe
when you’re far
I don’t believe
Seven roads I had to journey through and they always led me back to you
We are even better able to follow the development of each song. Three of the tracks are versions of the same song, “Bright.”
I’m not saying that “Stereophonic” would have worked better as a musical (although, yes, I still think it would have benefitted from cutting some of the extraneous dialogue.) But perhaps there is a lesson here, or at least a suggestion. If it’s a different — likely richer — experience to attend a production of “Hamlet” after you’ve read the play, so it might help to listen to the music before attending “Stereophonic.”
TRACKLIST
1. Seven Roads
2. Bright v1
3. Masquerade
4. Bright (Fast)
5. Drive
6. Champagne
7. East of Eden
8. Domino
9. “It’s made of teak”
10. In Your Arms
11. BVs
12. Exorcist II
13. Campfire Masquerade
14. Bright (Take 22)
