The monumentally silly idea—and not a new one, either—behind Rocktopia is mashing up 1960s-1970s rock warhorses with classical music warhorses to demonstrate that the old and the new can run in the same idiotic race. The result is that when the classical music favorites are combined with the rock standards, both are coarsely cheapened.
So going on at length about this high-decibel, lowbrow debacle is pointless, but a few explanations on how it’s all gone often hilariously wrong aren’t totally uncalled for.
Aside from holding whoever came up with the giddy notion entirely responsible for Rocktopia, most of the blame has to be placed on Randall Craig Fleischer, who carpentered the bloated arrangements and who, billed as Maestro Randall Craig Fleischer, conducts them for maximum deafening results.
Anyone reading this and in love with rock from those decades will have already guessed that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” is present here. It’s blasted in tandem with—wait for it—Ludwig von Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 7.” One especially laugh-out-loud pairing is Giacomo Puccini’s “Quando Me’n Vo” with George Harrison’s “Something.” The cutesie-poo idea behind the linking is that both chat about feminine movement.
And so it goes for two and a half Mozart-Styx-ensnarled hours with one intermission andone spectacularly numbing sequence in which the featured cast takes on Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma (No one is Sleeping)” and wrestles with it until it cries “Uncle.” You can bet there’s no one sleeping as this group caterwauling carries on.
No one could possible sleep throughout the entire production. Absolutely everything is amplified, including, of course, the assaulted arias. And since the enterprise is presented as a rock concert on Michael Stiller’s set with a Stiller-Austin Switser projection design harking back to Joshua White Show days, everything from start to finish is obstreperous.
The featured cast is billed in this order: Rob Evan, Chloe Lowry, Tony Vincent, Kimberley Nicole, Alyson Cambridge, and special guest star Pat Monahan, the Train lead singer. Supporting them are violinist Mairead Nesbitt, guitarist Tony Bruno, and pianist Henry Aronson. The New York Contemporary Symphony and the New York Contemporary Choir attend. There is no director credited, but perhaps not for lack of trying. Or maybe it’s executive producer William Franzblau.
Belting, whether rock or classical, is the well-honored order of the day. And while Nesbitt fiddles for all she’s worth and Bruno works his guitar and his hips, the singer-screamers adhere to ear-splitting rock traditions, including melismatic embellishments codified on The Voice, where a couple of these shouters spent time, and on the now-returning American idol.
I saw a press matinee on the Saturday when the March for Our Lives was taking place. Parkland, Florida, students, along with huge crowds worldwide, were protesting gun laws, pressing for voter registration and praising their teachers in an historic national, even international, protest.
So it was a particular pain in the neck to hear portly, middle-aged Evan, once so effective in Jekyll & Hyde, yell the Pink Floyd lyric from “Another Brick in the Wall,” “Teacher, we don’t want no education.” Could anything have been more out of joint with the times? The effrontery to the effects of good education on display throughout the marches was stunning.
Note: The costumes that Cynthia Nordstrom designed for the Rocktopia women all looked glitzy but shredded. Is it possible that Nordstrom meant them as a devious metaphor for the shredded music?
Rocktopia opened March 27, 2018, at the Broadway Theatre and runs through April 29. Tickets and information at Rocktopia.com
