It’s not often that I start a review by nodding to a hair and wigs designer, but truly, the ever-reliable Cookie Jordan, currently represented on Broadway by The Cher Show, deserves the shout-out for her new work downtown, where she’s summoning the tonsorial splendor of other late-20th century pop stars.
Here, at the Atlantic Theater’s Stage 2, Jordan’s sources of inspiration are the title characters of Eddie and Dave, Amy Staats’s hilarious, unexpectedly touching and altogether delightful reimagining of one of classic rock’s last, best epic rivalries—between Eddie Van Halen, the sweet-faced, blazingly virtuosic guitarist for the band bearing his surname, and David Lee Roth, the group’s charismatic frontman, whose relatively modest gifts as a singer mattered less than his talent for comically flamboyant self-promotion. No one got further on hair and hot air than Diamond Dave, and that’s saying something, given the era in which he reigned.
Staats’s play charts Van Halen’s rise, which began in the ’70s, through the eyes of a former video jockey for MTV, which ascended while propelling the band to new heights in the next decade. The VJ, who still juggles a fan’s enduring passion with a jaded pro’s knowing wit—both captured in Vanessa Aspillaga’s dynamic performance—serves as narrator while also inserting herself into small roles, starting with the macho Dutch dad who brought Eddie and his brother, Alex, to California as children. Aspillaga later appears as Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson and Roth’s eventual replacement in Van Halen, Sammy Hagar, and pops in as various minor figures, male and female.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★ review here.]
More notably, Eddie and Dave and Eddie’s brother, Alex Van Halen, the group’s drummer, are all portrayed by women, with the sole male cast member playing Eddie’s then-wife, sitcom star Valerie Bertinelli. (Bassist Michael Anthony is mentioned only briefly in the 90-minute play; the VJ quips there’s “not enough time” to dwell on the fourth original member.) The gender twist is a clever conceit on a couple of levels; first, it allows director Margot Bordelon and Megan Hill, who plays Roth, to revel in the hirsute crooner’s diva-like qualities—also emphasized by the scrumptiously over-the-top, divinely tacky costumes, by Montana Levi Blanco, that accompany the flowing blond mane fashioned by Jordan.
Eddie, as played by Staats herself, also suggests stereotypically feminine qualities in his more passive, demure behavior. If the old-school models of showmanship that Roth aspired to, from the Rat Pack to vintage R&B, offered different, rather more elegant strains of machismo than those that thundered in arena rock, Eddie—his bodacious musicianship notwithstanding—exuded little bravado in general, certainly when compared to his forever strutting, mugging foil.
Staats plays this contrast for laughs, initially making Eddie timid—and, it must be said, a bit dim—to the point of shadowing Adina Verson’s deftly butch Alex while Hill’s Roth strides across the stage like a peacock on Viagra, forever selling himself. Describing his inspiration for Van Halen’s music—which Eddie primarily writes (Roth did provide lyrics, and band members were credited collectively for songs)—the singer tells a radio interviewer, in a pitch-perfect simulation of Roth-speak, “They’re part ocean, part mountain, part long tan leg, part boogie woogie…You got a problem with it? Go talk to the ocean.” (The music is evoked in spirit through pre-recorded original compositions. modeled on hit tunes, by Michael Thurber.)
Hill, who is marvelous, sells these lines like a born huckster, while also injecting just a tinge of the desperation that will emerge later. Staats’s delicate, deadpan earnestness is the perfect counterweight, and as both a playwright and an actor, she brings genuine affection and tenderness to her portraits of the stars and their fraught relationship. When Staats’s young, nervous Eddie worries that his puffy helmet of hair “makes me look like a woman or somethin'” (though he and Omer Abbas Salem’s dry, lanky Valerie look less like twins than the real-life couple did), Hill’s Dave pumps him up: “It makes you look like Hermes, man.” Later, following bumps in Dave’s career and Eddie’s life, when the latter calls his old colleague about possibly reuniting, their overeager, awkward laughter speaks volumes.
Eddie and Dave is also something of a requiem for a bygone time, pre-reality TV—which made MTV’s original programming irrelevant as surely as video had killed the radio star earlier—and before snark, which is refreshingly absent in this play, had become a defining feature of pop culture. “Young people in the audience,” the VJ intones, as viewers sit surrounded by the rock memorabilia (album covers, set lists, a gold record) that set designer Reid Thompson has placed all around them, “when you see an aging rock star, remember, all things great and magical are inherently ridiculous, and you yourself are ridiculous, or will be soon if you are lucky and very, very brave.” Or as Roth would have put it, might as well jump.
Eddie and Dave opened January 22, 2019, at Atlantic Stage 2 and runs through February 10. Tickets and information: atlantictheater.org
