Part C:
ALMOST FAMOUS
Book by Cameron Crowe
based upon his screenplay
Music and Lyrics by Tom Kitt
Directed by Jeremy Herrin
Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
Almost Famous incurs my half-the-same show reaction in part because at least it’s not a tract. It’s about William Miller (Casey Likes), an 18-year old kid who aspires to be a rock journalist and through a freak circumstance, gets his chance to do it for Rolling Stone. He goes on the road with a band about to break big, Stillwater, and learns a lot about the people behind the image, in particular lead guitarist Russell Hammond (Chris Wood) who “trusts” him.
His mother (Anika Larsen), despite being no nonsense and formidable, has given her reluctant blessing to this adventure, but her warnings against drug use and other such destructive seductions leave no room for equivocation; and she demands that he return in time for his high school graduation ceremony.
This musical, based on a screenplay by its librettist, Cameron Crowe, is somewhat better. A semi-autobiographical story based on his own experience, it at least has a certain amount of insider authenticity and a storytelling universe that’s fully realized. And a well-crafted, mostly rock score—with a few effective and appropriate non-rock detours—music and lyrics by Tom Kitt, that abets the verisimilitude nicely. The direction by Jeremy Herrin is always at least solid and the cast is uniformly excellent.
But it’s still under-realized. And there’s the rest of my half-the-same-show reaction. It never truly takes its characters to the max.
For one thing, there’s little plot tension arising out of urgency. The clock on William’s adventure is one of little consequence; he’s a good student, his grades are high, he’s completed his academic requirements and if he doesn’t make the ceremony, so what? It’s not as if that would actually prevent him getting his diploma in a timely fashion.
The template-savvy will recognize this as this one of those coming-of-age stories about an observer—sometimes the best friend, sometimes the lover—sometimes, as in this case, the de facto protégé—who tags alongside the charismatic. Who is kind of swept along with his or her energy until something of the dark underbelly reveals itself, whereupon the observer at first has to deal with his own feelings of idolization shattered and at the end learns to temper those feelings with compassion and accept the charismatic’s flawed humanity.
Only Almost Famous doesn’t even give us that. William is pretty much onto Russell from the start. And he’s a good kid. He cares about what he’s doing too much and he’s been raised too well to be lured by drugs or much of anything that will put him in danger; even the emotional danger is mild. His biggest crisis is whether to write the unvarnished truth about what he sees or soft-pedal, so as not to betray Russell’s feelings of trust, which he never really agreed to honor in the first place (and he has in fact been well-warned by an older, veteran rock journalist [Rob Colletti] that this is how rock musicians play the game). All things considered, the stakes in this story are really quite low. And oh, yes, Russell is a married man, but he has a roadie girlfriend (Solea Pfeiffer) for whom he will never leave his wife, and who is, to William an “older woman” on whom he has a very protective crush.
The tropes here, of course, are coming-of-age standard.
In fact, substitute rock music on the road in the ‘70s for summer stock operetta in 1951 and they almost exactly parallel the late screenwriter David Shaber’s 1980 film (and subsequent novelization), Those Lips, Those Eyes—which did it all much better: Artie (Thomas Hulce), the young observer, really does have his academic career on the line (he’s a med student, but working backstage, he’s caught the theatre bug), who doesn’t want to disappoint his parents, in particular his Dad (Jerry Stiller); the company star, the fabled Harry Crystal (Frank Langella), really is as genuinely heroic as he is genuinely flawed; and there’s the complex, slightly older girl Artie has a crush on, who does give him a tumble, only it turns out that she’s married…
This is not to say that Almost Famous is anybody’s disaster; for all its rock and roll, it tells a sweet story entertainingly enough. But it’s nobody’s triumph either.
Enough with the tropes.
Musicals need to be aiming higher.