The primary joke in Amy Staats’ Eddie and Dave, a spoofy treatment of rock musical band Van Halen, is that acclaimed guitarist Eddie Van Halen is played by Staats herself; older brother and drummer Al Van Halen is played by Adina Verson; lead singer David Lee Roth, or Dave, is played by Megan Hill; Valerie Bertinelli, One Day at a Time television star and in time Mrs. Eddie Van Halen, is played by Omer Abbas Salem; and the work’s narrator, an MTV veejay (who may be fictional and perhaps is based on Staats’ own Van Halen fanhood) is played by Vanessa Aspillaga.
Yes, the switched gender ploy is cute as a Facebook puppy video for a while. There’s Staats’ impersonations of Eddie attacking his axe, Hill’s replicating Roth’s rooster-like showing off and the tall Salem’s hairy-chested take on Bertinelli. But for all of the comedy’s 90 intermissionless minutes it’s not really a barrel of sustained laughs and chuckles.
After about 20, maybe even 30 of those 90 minutes, we’ve seen enough of Staats’ guitar miming and Hill’s strutting as the full-of-himself Roth and Salem’s amusing go at femininity. What’s left is the deliberately cockeyed band history. (Incidentally, Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony doesn’t figure into the action. ”There isn’t enough time,” our passionate veejay humorously explains. Roth replacement Sammy Hagar isn’t seen, either, but is talked about.)
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★ review here.]
The narrating veejay—who proclaims she’s been gaga for the group for years and explains she’s presenting “a memory play”—begins the stage biography when 9-year-old Al Van Halen and 7-year-old Eddie arrive on United States shores from the Netherlands and start becoming proficient at their instruments. Only a few years pass before they’re playing to local crowds where one admirer is rich kid Roth from the uppity part of town. He pursues them, convinced that his addition as lead singer can take them much farther than the immediate vicinity.
He’s right, of course. They rocket, and Eddie and Dave eventually move into territory familiar to just about any rock ‘n’ roll fan who knows the intramural anguish to which bands subject themselves. They also acquire other destructive habits, like drugs, which Eddie succumbs to heavily.
Maybe the most standard occurrence for any band, hot or tepid, is that internecine battling. This one’s biggest explosion happened at the 1996 MTV awards night, which the veejay mentions early but takes a while getting around to. The blow-up occurs backstage when, after being apart for 11 years, the Van Halen brothers are reunited with Roth as award presenters. Together again, they get on each other’s last nerve, the glitch being just who is the most celebrated group member, Diamond Dave or Eddy.
So Eddie and Dave shifts into covering the predictable history of the pit into which so many rock bands fall. The descent is partly mitigated, however, by the colorful production director Margot Bordelon gives it. Reid Thomson’s set, with the stage right area featuring the veejay’s busy office, and Shawn Boyle’s dizzying projections help keep things humming. Montana Levi Blanco’s costumes and certainly Cookie Jordan’s hair and wigs also abet, Roth’s famous mullet amusingly reconstructed.
Then there are Palmer Hefferan’s sound and Michael Thurber’s original compositions. To be sure, Eddie and Dave is not a rock concert, but enough music is heard to remind listeners why Eddie was repeatedly recognized by Guitar World as the world’s greatest master of the instrument. Staats does her reminding as well in the script.
By the way, Staats’ gender-changing tactic is reminiscent of the 2003 Mindy Kaling-Brenda Withers Matt and Ben, in which the authors played Matt Damon and Ben Affleck creating Good Will Hunting, the Oscar-winning screenplay that landed Robin Williams his Oscar. As Kaling and Withers have it, their script quite unexpectedly drops in on them from the ceiling—fully written.
Is Staats saluting Kaling and Withers when a Rolling Stone issue with Eddie on the cover unexpectedly drops in on them from his ceiling? If she is, she’s forgotten that the Matt and Ben authors kept their spoof short(er), a tip from which she might have learned.
Eddie and Dave opened January 22, 2019, at Atlantic Stage 2 and runs through February 10. Tickets and information: atlantictheater.org
