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written by Chris D’Arienzo, directed by Kristin Hanggi

Mirvish Productions, Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto

May 11, 2010-January 2, 2011

Whether or not you should see the new jukebox musical Rock of Ages will depend entirely on your favourite style of music from the 1980s.  If your soundtrack for the period includes New Wave, synth pop, funk-soul, hip-hop, R&B, house, post-punk or indie rock, forget it.  The range of music for Rock of Ages is solely arena rock, specifically hair metal.  It is cobbled together from excerpts of 31 songs in only two styles--power ballads or anthems--from groups like Bon Jovi, Foreigner, Journey, Pat Benatar and Twisted Sister.  What pleasure there is comes from the energy the well-cast singers put into covering these oldies.

The story concerns Drew (Yves Pedneault), a would-be rocker, who meets Sherrie (Elicia MacKenzie), a would-be actress from Kansas in the Bourbon Room, a seedy bar on Sunset Strip.  Then enters our bad guy, German developer Hertz (Victor A. Young), who wants to tear down this rock ‘n’ roll hangout to build a mall.  The plot is merely a collection of clichéd situations and paper-thin characters serving only as an excuse to paste the songs together.  Our narrator Lonnie (Aaron Walpole) says as much straight out in Act 2.  Is a show any better than a heap of cheesy trash just because it knows it is?  The show satirizes hair metal and its own vacuity to such an extent that you have to wonder what the original point was supposed to be.   

At least it provides a showcase for some fine singing.  Pedneault puts across songs like “I Wanna Rock” better than the original artists.  MacKenzie shakes off her nun’s habit from The Sound of Music and really blossoms.  However, the real standouts are Cody Scott Lancaster as Hertz’s seemingly effeminate son Franz and Peter Deiwick as once-famous rocker Stacee Jaxx.  Lancaster comes out as hetero with surprisingly tough rendition of “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” while the often shirtless Deiwick gives a wonderfully channels David Lee Roth at his sleaziest.  Kelly Devine’s choreography of generic music video aerobics is a let-down and Kristin Hanggi directs as if the show were a live-action cartoon.  The hand-or-face-on-crotch gesture underlining every joke gets really old really soon.  The decibel level is so outrageously high, I had to put in earplugs when my ears began to hurt 30 minutes into the show.  Only then could I hear the music and all lyrics at a reasonable level.  It’s lucky that Mirvish have allowed the distracting service of booze during the performance because the higher your blood alcohol content and the lower your attention span, the more you’ll enjoy the show.     

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-05-12.

Photo: Yves Pedneault and Elicia MacKenzie.  ©Joan Marcus.