David Adjmi‘s play Stereophonic — which debuted at NYC’s Playwrights Horizons last year — is now on Broadway! Containing music by Will Butler (who is no longer in Arcade Fire, still a solo artist on Merge Records), it was written by Daniel Aukin. Here’s the official Playbill synopsis: “Stereophonic mines the agony and the ecstasy of creation as it zooms in on a music studio in 1976, where an up-and-coming rock band finds itself on the cusp of superstardom…this electrifying new play takes audiences inside the powder keg process of a band on the brink of blowing up.”
The story recalls that of Fleetwood Mac, but Adjmi told Playbill that wasn’t his only source of inspiration: “There’s aspects of Fleetwood Mac, there’s aspects of Bruce Springsteen, there’s aspects of Keith Richards. There’s so many archetypal elements in this play that I think it’s reductive to just say this is the Fleetwood Mac bio-play.”
Stereophonic is also described as “a play with music” rather than a musical, and stars Will Brill, Andrew R. Butler, Juliana Canfield, Eli Gelb, Tom Pecinka, Sarah Pidgeon, and Chris Stack.
It’s currently in previews at Golden Theatre (252 W 45th St) and officially opens on April 19 for a 14-week run. Tickets are on sale.
Stereophonic received positive reviews last year during its off-Broadway run, with the New York Times saying:
You could rightly say it’s a play with music, emphasis on the “play”: In a little more than three hours it features just six songs, some of them fragmentary.
But that would be to shortchange the ingenious way Adjmi weaves sound and story into something as granular as it is operatic. Granular because the songs (by Will Butler) are not decorations but are elemental to the plot, in which the five members of a rock band spend a year of the mid-1970s writing and laying down tracks for an epochal new album while bickering over each riff and tempo. Operatic because what they wind up recording, however refracted through a commercial pop lens, inevitably expresses their heartache, betrayal and fury.
You can check out the music video for one of the play’s songs, “Masquerade,” below.
More info and tickets HERE.