The personal and creative synergy between John Lennon and Paul McCartney remains one of the great miracles, and mysteries, of the past century. Though the Beatles’ primary songwriters generally shared credit for the many classics they crafted, their individual gifts and quirks shaped a pair of contrasting personae: John was perceived as the acerbic rebel, forever taking jabs at the establishment in all its forms, from pop stardom to politics, while Paul was the merry master melodist, a cherubic savant effortlessly pouring forth a stream of buoyant hits.
Through much of its 70-minute duration, Only Yesterday, a new play imagining a conversation between the young Lennon and McCartney, seems to endorse this oversimplified view. First-time playwright Bob Stevens, a veteran TV writer and producer (Malcolm in the Middle, The Wonder Years, Murphy Brown) was inspired by an interview McCartney gave NPR host Terry Gross years later, excerpted at the beginning and end of the play, in which the rock legend recalled being stranded in a hotel room with Lennon in Key West, Florida, during a hurricane. It was 1964, we learn, and the Beatles were scheduled to stage a concert in Jacksonville when the storm stopped them in their tracks.
“We stayed up all night, talking, talking, talking like it was going out of style,” McCartney’s recorded voice informs us, before we’re introduced to Christopher Sears and Tommy Crawford, who respectively play Lennon and McCartney in their early 20s. It’s thanks largely to the energy, facility and immense charm of these actors—and director Carol Dunne’s light, sure hand and obvious affection for the subject matter—that Stevens’s slight, often predictable account works as well as it does here.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★ review here.]
Like any good sitcom writer, Stevens knows how to establish a scene. John and Paul enter a sparsely furnished room that, via set designer Michael Ganio, suggests a basic offering at a Days Inn. “This takes the biscuit,” John sneers, to which Paul responds, pleasantly, “It’s not so bad,” prompting John to retort, with withering sarcasm, “Oh, it’s lovely.”
And so it goes, as the two Beatles—George and Ringo are sharing another room, it emerges—trade observations and jibes covering a too-neatly ordered range of subjects: social justice (Paul agrees with John that they should refuse to perform in front of a segregated audience, as officials have planned), the demands of fans and the media (John has less patience for them, of course), their journey to fame (“Me Dad told me it was time to get a real job” at one point, Paul recalls) and, inevitably, musical inspiration.
“I want to write something that means something!” John complains, while Paul argues on behalf of love songs—and reminds his partner of their list of chart-topping singles and their millions of fans, which naturally only frustrates Lennon further.
Only Yesterday does veer away from its clichéd portraits of the rock heroes, and gains some emotional traction, when the two young men shift their focus to the personal tragedies that helped secure their bond—even if the accompanying dialogue continues to flirt with banality. An adolescent admirer who manages to establish contact with them, sweetly voiced by Olivia Swayze, is also a disarming touch, though another supporting character, a road manager capably played by Christopher Flockton, is less compellingly drawn, dismissing the blokes as “tossers” as he walks on and off.
But Only Yesterday is at its blissfully, unabashedly nostalgic best when Crawford and Sears pick up guitars and begin playing and singing—not Beatles originals, but other, earlier rock classics, including a few the Fab Four covered famously. Though their vocals evoke some of the color and tone of McCartney’s buttery tenor and Lennon’s rawer baritone (Sears, like many a jukebox-musical performer, clearly has stronger technique than his subject), their intention—and Stevens’s, and Dunne’s—is not impersonation, à la Beatlemania, or the more recent Rain. It’s to capture, or at least celebrate, the ineffable chemistry, that combination of tension and joy, that informed this legendary partnership, and it’s inevitably in song that the play comes closest to accomplishing that goal.
Only Yesterday opened September 12, 2019 at 59E59 and runs through September 29. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
