Heart of Rock and Roll Puts The Comedy in Rom Com
May 10, 2024 ‘The Heart of Rock and Roll’ puts the comedy in rom-com
By: Ruthie Fierberg
Director Gordon Greenberg discusses creating a laugh-out-loud, ’80s-set “confection” of a musical.
The new musical “The Heart of Rock and Roll” offers what is currently a rarity on Broadway: a bonafide romantic comedy. The show follows Bobby, a bandleader turned cardboard factory assembly line worker aiming for the corporate sales floor, and Cassandra, the cardboard company’s accountant trying to keep her decades-old family business afloat. As Bobby angles for a promotion, he becomes the man in Cassandra’s corner, but his former bandmates come calling with the opportunity of a lifetime. Director Gordon Greenberg first looked at a script by book writer Jonathan A. Abrams nearly 10 years ago, in a nascent stage. “What I saw [in the pages], and especially in Jonathan as a person, was that kindness and same generosity of spirit that I associate with ’80s movies that I loved by people like Garry Marshall and John Hughes,” Greenberg said. “A world that now seems innocent by comparison to the way we live and process information. I think it’s not unlike how my parents felt in the ’80s and ’90s about the ’50s.” Seeing that heart-forward sensibility, Greenberg signed on to the musical — set to a score inspired by the songs of Huey Lewis and the News.
Greenberg jokes that the first script “bears almost no resemblance to what you see onstage,” but its tone does. Bobby works for a cardboard box company, after all. There’s a purity there, but it also allowed for a tongue-in-cheek opening number in “Hip to Be Square.” “I’ve always thought of this as a show that lives a foot off the ground,” Greenberg said. “It has that sort of buoyancy and fizz to it.” Greenberg counts Marshall (“my comedic idol”), known for rom-coms like “Pretty Woman” and “The Princess Diaries,” as well as Mel Brooks and Sid Caesar among his inspirations. So it should be no surprise that “The Heart of Rock and Roll” combines nostalgia, wit and a self-aware over-the-topness that has audiences guffawing. Between the endearing goofiness of McKenzie Kurtz’s Cassandra, the absurdity of Orville Mendoza’s furniture titan character Fjord and the comic uptightness of Billy Harrison Tighe’s Tucker (Cassandra’s ex), there is much to relate to and laugh at. “We’ve kept exploring how to give the show as many layers of comedy, but also layers of humanity,” Greenberg said. “I always say we’ve got to grow roots, not just branches, because as ridiculous as Billy’s character is, it still has to make sense to him.” Toeing the line between hilarity and overreaching is a tricky one to navigate. “It’s instinct, and it’s also being willing to be wrong,” Greenberg said. For example, in the song “I Want a New Drug,” Bobby battles the irresistible magnetism of his guitar; Corey Cott, who plays Bobby, sings the tune like it is a power ballad of desire, so Greenberg thought that women ensemblists should emerge from Bobby’s bed. “I really wanted to manifest them as the [spirit of] the guitar, and for a minute I said, ‘Let’s have Fjord come out of there, too, and just see what happens,’” Greenberg recalled. “And it was the wrong laugh. It wasn’t right for that moment. But being willing to try things that could be very wrong is the only way you’re going to find things that are very right.” In fact, that kind of trial and error led to more than one crucial discovery. Despite inspiration from John Hughes movies and Huey Lewis’ music, the musical’s out-of-town production at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre didn’t take place in the ’80s. It was set in the “vague now.”
But Greenberg realized that the story of a band looking to get signed felt like it was a story lifted from the 1980s. “Nowadays that band would put themselves online and the court of public opinion would decide,” Greenberg explained. “When I brought the idea to our amazing producer in New York, Hunter Arnold … everyone without a moment’s hesitation said, ‘Why didn’t we do that to begin with?’” “The floodgates were open in terms of design because it’s a feast for silhouettes and shapes and colors,” the director continued. “Doing the ’80s, you want to do it with affection of the way John Hughes did — so that it has all the hallmarks of the ’80s — but we’re not making fun of it.” Even if it is an intentionally cheeky version of the era. The change of time period impacted the ways in which audiences receive the story overall. “Once you say: This takes place 35 years ago, you immediately give it more latitude, more freedom to not be the exact experience you have every day and to turn off your sort of judgment and open up to a world seen through rose colored lenses,” Greenberg said. That provided leeway for the comedy to come forward. In Act 1, that includes a meeting in a sauna with punchlines about HR culture.
In Act 2, Greenberg and choreographer Lorin Lotarro stage a “nightmare ballet” involving wine, Xanax and an eventual stiletto stabbing. It’s raucous and yet it doesn’t distract from the love story at its center. “As a director, I have to use my internal barometer to try and make sure we are matching the aesthetic and sensibility and tone of the way I envisioned this whole show coming together,” Greenberg said. As a whole, the musical is both over the top and wholesome. Rom and com. “There’s also something very Midwestern about the tone of this,” Greenberg added. “It’s very American. It’s straightforward people who have careers that matter to them, but they’re not 100 percent defined by their careers, like people who are more coastal, probably.” “At the core of the show, that is a question that all of our principals are asking themselves about their work-life balance and the relationship between what they do and their families.” “The Heart of Rock and Roll” is an exercise in calibration. That also applies to its pace. “I’m always bored,” Greenberg laughed. “I’m like, ‘Let’s get onto the next idea.’ And the rate of new ideas that I look for in something like this — a confection — requires more new ideas than something that is mountainous, giant, earth-shattering drama.” “With something like this, where it’s all about carbonation — just because you break a few eggs doesn’t mean you’re making a meringue. You have to whip quickly and strategically,” he continued. “That’s why these kinds of shows take so much craft and diligence and specificity.”