Stereophonic by David Adjmi (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Stereophonic by David Adjmi
• Elizabeth L. Wollman

STEREOPHONIC. By David Adjmi, with music by Will Butler. Directed by Daniel Aukin. Playwrights Horizons, New York. October 15 and November 26, 2023.

When Stereophonic began previews in October 2023, David Adjmi argued that despite its setting in a 1970s recording studio and its focus on a newly famous rock group under pressure to top the success of their debut album, the piece was not a musical, but instead a “play with music.” The playwright professed an “allergy” to musicals, which to him reflected a “calcified idea” of “how music should feel in the theatre.” Such a distaste for musicals is standard among theatremakers who mine aspects of the rock world for the stage; more often than not, musicals are loudly dismissed as too commercial and formalistic to properly capture rock’s purportedly superior artistic “realness.”

Theatre critics tend to blithely accept and regurgitate such rockist attitudes. It’s no big surprise, then, that virtually every critic covering Stereophonic followed Adjmi’s lead by eschewing the musical theatre label as inaccurate for a show so authentic that it defied traditional descriptors. In his rave for the Washington Post, Peter Marks called Stereophonic “one of the best works of narrative art about the day-to-day grind and emotional toll of artistic creation,” compared aspects of it to those of Waiting for Godot, and described its characters as “refugees from classic drama.” The New York Times’ Jesse Green gushed that terms like “play with music,” “musical,” and even amalgams like “playical” fail Stereophonic, which never foundered, “as most theatrical treatments of the artistic process do, on either side of the genre divide.” Vulture’s Jackson McHenry likened Stereophonic to a “fugue” built of naturalistic threads that together wove “incandescent art.” “If you’ve recently tried to sate yourself with imitation-crab rock-history dramatizations like Daisy Jones and the Six,” he assured his readers, “you’ll find that Stereophonic is, refreshingly, the real thing.”

Don’t tell McHenry, but Stereophonic is more a companion to Daisy Jones than it is an artistically superior achievement to the television miniseries. Both are accessible entertainments that allow for fly-on-the-wall views of beautiful, overwhelmingly white musicians who fall in and out of love, swill and snort to excess, and argue, sometimes bitterly, as they toil away at making music together. Most obviously, both use Fleetwood Mac’s most celebrated lineup (drummer Mick Fleetwood, pianist/vocal-ist Christine McVie, bassist John McVie, guitarist/vocalist Lindsey Buckingham, singer Stevie Nicks) as a springboard, even as Daisy centers women’s experiences and has the luxury of many episodes with which to diverge from the source material. Stereophonic remains rooted in male perspectives and hews more closely to actual events that took place during the recording of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album Rumours: the unnamed band’s two couples hit the skids during a long stretch on an unlimited budget in a recording studio; the drummer’s long-distance marriage collapses; drugs, booze and endless retakes amp up the resentments and melodrama.

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Eli Gelb (Grover) and Andrew R. Butler (Charlie) in Stereophonic. (Photo: Chelcie Parry.)

Stereophonic had many strengths that distracted from its conventional plot, especially in performance and direction. The production generated real entertainment [End Page 223] by delving into some of the most repetitive, boring aspects of recording. Lavish attention to period detail abounded: the single set—a mid-1970s studio in Sausalito, California (where Fleetwood Mac happened to record Rumours)—was meticulously designed by David Zinn, with the recording booth upstage and control room downstage. Knit blankets and earth-toned throw pillows festooned mocha-brown corduroy furniture; packs of smokes, lighters, girlie magazines, beer bottles, and a hilariously substantial bag of coke littered the tables. Costume designer Enver Chakartash outfitted the cast in groovy fringed vests, psychedelic peasant blouses, patterned bell-bottoms, suede boots, and beaded moccasins.

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Andrew R. Butler (Charlie), Sarah Pidgeon (Diana), Chris Stack (Simon), and Juliana Canfield (Holly) in Stereophonic. (Photo: Chelcie Parry.)

Breathless paeans to the authenticity of the music notwithstanding, Stereophonic’s songs and song...