Overheard while entering the Ogunquit Playhouse for When Elvis Met the Beatles, a lady: “Well, at least the songs will be great.” A gentleman, looking at the poster: “I guess we know what the story will be.” She was right, he less so. The show brims with early rock’n’roll hits by the titular legends and others, many wonderfully (if ear-splittingly) performed. But the promised re-creation of one fabled 1965 encounter in a rented Hollywood mansion keeps getting sidetracked and muddled by inconsistent stylistic choices and moments of bad taste. The show’s creatives apparently threw every possible idea at set designer Klara Zieglerova’s video wall to see what would stick.
Confusion begins early with an unidentified Mama Thornton (Kris Lyons) performing a slow-drag “Hound Dog,” which I guess we’re supposed to know was originally “her” hit because no one bothers to clarify it. Big Mama will pop up later, still anonymous, while Little Richard (Marcus Antonio) seems to be living chez Elvis for some reason. Then we get pummeled incessantly by a hysterical knob (Dan DeLuca) who turns out to be Christopher Hutchins, the British journalist who allegedly brokered the historic get-together and documented it in a tome. Librettists Colin Carberry and Peter Thompson never give us a chance to get to know him; instead, director Hunter Foster has DeLuca narrate the artists’ biographies and rock’n’roll history in breathless rat-a-tat style, like Casey Kasem on Adderall. (We are later invited to find him sympathetic, but the annoying caricature is too firmly established for any humanity to seep through.)
All the usual suspects are present and accounted for: Elvis’s naïve companion Priscilla (Bella Serrano, excellent), evil genius Col. Tom Parker (Bruce Sabath), promiscuous Beatles manager Brian Epstein (Steven Telsey), stuffy TV impresario Ed Sullivan (Rick Faugno), and of course the five legends themselves. Daniel Durston’s Elvis gets some genuine interior life going, particularly in his scenes with Priscilla, and Jed Feder’s phlegmatic Ringo, ever overlooked, is a droll delight. Sam Sherwood’s John Lennon shouldn’t be required to shout at the top of his lungs all the time — where’s the intellectual superiority, the dry wit behind In His Own Write? — and I kept confusing John Drinkwater’s George and Sam C. Jones’s Paul, at least until George started discussing his sitar fascination to kick off a production number drenched with psychedelic imagery, one of the many poor ideas that need to be jettisoned.
Still and all, whereas Beatlemania years ago oversold itself as “an incredible simulation,” I was content with Ogunquit’s reasonable facsimiles of the originals. But why, oh why is the show not content to tell a plausible version of August 27, 1965?
To be sure, on the (rare) occasions when the sound dial is turned down and everyone is permitted to talk like real people, things click. Sabath, channeling John Huston’s Noah Cross in Chinatown, possesses just the right blend of charming and sinister to go toe-to-toe with the slick, scheming Telsey as they compare puppetmaster styles. The lads let their long hair down to share their touring ambivalence, while their Memphis-bred idol mourns the parade of stupid movies he’s contracted to churn out. Once the stars’ initial suspicion of each other is crisply established, we delightedly follow the thaw born of a shared love of music, culminating in mutual respect and, maybe, a kind of love.
But all this other overwrought, extraneous junk keeps interrupting. That guru-inspired turn, for instance, or the full drum set magically appearing in 525 Perugia Way’s living room. Why couldn’t Ringo provide whatever makeshift percussion was at hand, as he likely did that night? It’s not enough that he and Priscilla bond charmingly over the woes of being perceived as a fifth wheel, but they have to perform a forced version of “They’re Gonna Put Me in the Movies” that kills the show stone dead. Hutchins keeps jerkily running upstairs to a toilet (we see and hear it) to jot down frantic notes. To motivate a blowup centered on personal politics, Lennon is required to go ballistic at the sight of – I kid you not – a chuckwagon-shaped lamp reading “All the Way With LBJ,” possibly the lamest prop-inspired plot complication since a beat-up bicycle sparked a race riot in 1985’s Grind. And Alison Solomon’s choreography can’t be adequately assessed, because it appears at such slapdash and often unmotivated moments. “Any excuse for high-volume hijinks” seems to be everyone’s charge, and they run with it, exhaustingly.
I do retain hopes for When Elvis Met the Beatles’s future, and largely on the strength of its finale, for which I suppose I must offer a spoiler alert. Finally allowed to act like a person, Hutchins provides the often melancholy post-mortem, after which he invites us to imagine what never happened that night nor any other night: a once-only joint appearance in which the King and the Fab Four would perform each other’s hits. This critic had no qualms about bounding to his feet along with the entire crowd to cheer on a Beatle-tinged “Heartbreak Hotel” or an Elvis-infused “Help!” Yet all I could think was, if only this had been the first showstopper of the night, instead of the fifth or sixth; if only our appetite for rock’n’roll Valhalla had been kept in hungry abeyance. By the time of the final bows the roof of the venerable Ogunquit might be gone forever.
Foster, Carberry, Patterson et al. would do well to look at Kemp Powers’s One Night in Miami…, or even the relatively lower-key theatrics of Million Dollar Quartet, as models for keeping one’s artistic gyroscope focused on character and real-life conflict when famous figures come together. Telling the story at hand is what we’re led to expect, and what we as lifelong fans deserve.
When Elvis Met the Beatles opened August 30, 2025, at the Ogunquit Playhouse [Ogunquit, Maine] and runs through September 27. Tickets and information: ogunquitplayhouse.org
