How a Band Falls Apart, According to Stereophonic
Like the members of Fleetwood Mac, or the Mamas & the Papas, or the Beatles, or Van Halen, the rock band at the center of the Broadway play Stereophonic can’t seem to keep its act together. The bassist stumbles drunk and late into a recording session; the guitarist keeps futzing with the tempo on a song. The musicians are clearly close with one another—lots of inside jokes, lots of casual touching—but that only makes the bickering more personal.
David Adjmi’s play, which on Sunday night won five Tony awards including Best Play, follows the growing schisms among five members of an unnamed 1970s rock band as they record their sophomore album. Stereophonic draws heavily from the era’s rock-and-roll aesthetics: brown-toned, heavily carpeted decor; vibrant, guitar-heavy songs written by the former Arcade Fire member Will Butler; copious amounts of booze, weed, and cocaine lying around. The show has drawn the strongest comparisons to Fleetwood Mac, especially because the band’s core couple seems to mirror the tumultuous relationship between the singer Stevie Nicks and the guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. This very real human messiness is the draw—the sense of making it up as they go leads to exciting discoveries, but it also fosters anxiety and doubt. The end result may be great music, but Stereophonic leaves us wondering whether it was worth the sacrifices required to get there.
Stereophonic takes place entirely within the locus of any band’s creative life: the studio. As married couple Reg (Will Brill, who won an acting Tony on Sunday) and Holly (Juliana Canfield)—who is planning on moving out of the shared house where everyone lives together—argue about their relationship, they do so in front of their bandmates, plus the sound engineers. Meanwhile, the guitarist Peter (Tom Pecinka) needles his girlfriend, Diana (Sarah Pidgeon), a singer who gets so nervous about what to do with her hands onstage that she takes up the tambourine. Despite their idiosyncrasies, they’re united in the pursuit of rock stardom, a dream that becomes more realistic as their first album starts to climb the charts. But by keeping the action isolated from the payoff of popularity, Adjmi is able to keep a focus instead on how that success changes the group, then tears them apart.
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As the recording sessions drag out, the tensions ratchet up; some scenes begin after midnight. But it’s during some of their worst personal moments that the most important musical triumphs occur. In one scene, Diana is having trouble hitting the high note in a song called “East of Eden,” in which a narrator implores a lover to avoid making a false choice between two compatible life paths. Peter seems to be focused on the future—perfecting the album, having a child with Diana. She is less certain, and still processing the fame they’re experiencing now; she often frets about not being smart or talented enough. She and Peter end up arguing offstage, with hot mics that allow the engineers (and the audience) to hear everything, and break up. Still, she returns to the microphone for another take—and finally hits the note.
The moment is more than a satisfying triumph in the narrative; there’s a bittersweet yet voyeuristic allure to watching a professional high follow personal suffering. One real-world analogue is Fleetwood Mac’s 1997 performance of “Silver Springs,” a recording of which periodically goes viral. At the time, 20 years had passed since the band released its rollicking magnum opus, Rumours, and the classic lineup—Nicks, Buckingham, Christine and John McVie, and Mick Fleetwood—hadn’t worked together full-time in a decade. As she sings, Nicks focuses her intense gaze on Buckingham, almost like she’s trying to curse him. They had joined the band as a couple, musically and romantically, and broke up while Rumours was in production; the song’s title refers to a Washington, D.C., suburb that came to represent the life Nicks and Buckingham would never have together. We, as the audience, get the thrill of experiencing a great performance and observing the tantalizing context, somewhat masking the sharpness of the very real strife that prompted it. The inverse is true for Diana: Her success can’t fully distract from the pain of knowing that her partnership with Peter is truly over.
There’s an impulse to recast one’s struggles in a positive light when looking back: Everything is worth it because it got me to this point. Near the end of the show, Diana does this herself. After a sound engineer describes the recording process as a “nightmare,” she rebuffs him, saying, “This was the best thing that ever happened to me.” But the sentiment falls somewhat flat after the audience watches the band splinter over the course of three hours, for the sake of something we never see in its final form (only a few songs are performed in full, though the show released a full cast album). The notion of good coming from bad is a romantic one, but the reality isn’t a zero-sum game. No amount of popularity will necessarily fill the gap left by someone you loved; perfection doesn’t necessarily negate the means of achieving it.
And so the show’s real heartbreak is watching the band’s shaggy enthusiasm be replaced with cool professionalism. There isn’t one huge fight that breaks them apart. Instead, you watch each member’s commitment—to the music, to one another—dwindle until getting them all in the same room at the same time is difficult. The loss isn’t just the music, but the people they used to be. At one point, Peter breaks down, tearfully pleading to Diana: “Say you’re my family.” Maybe they were family once, or something close to it—but that was a different time, one immortalized in wax and then left behind.
*Lead-image sources: Kristin Gallegos; Fireshot / Universal Images Group / Getty; Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Larry Hulst / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty.