The musical by Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan and theater veteran Joe DiPietro takes on the story of color-barrier-breaking DJ Dewey Phillips.
By Mike Boehm
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 31, 2008
LA JOLLA, CALIF. -- "JERSEY BOYS," the show, came off well for the La Jolla Playhouse. The rock 'n' roll bio-play about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons opened late in 2004 and soon after moved to Broadway, where it won a Tony Award for best musical and looks to keep playing to packed houses into the next decade.
Now La Jolla has the not-quite-sequel: Jersey Boys, the partnership -- Joe DiPietro and David Bryan, a writer-composer team of 46-year-olds who, on the face of it, are one of the oddest theatrical couplings since Neil Simon thought up Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar.
Their show, "Memphis," tells how black rhythm and blues music began to reach white listeners on Southern airwaves during the early 1950s. First produced five years ago in Boston and the Bay Area, it's having a retooled staging in La Jolla.
DiPietro, the word guy, is from Oradell in north Jersey. He has close-cropped hair, wears scuffed sandals and was stage-struck from the moment the lights went up on "1776," his first show as a kid. His calling card: “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” a revue about modern romance that closed July 27 after 12 years and 5,003 New York performances -- second only to "The Fantasticks" among off-Broadway musicals.
The music man is Bryan. Born David Bryan Rashbaum, he's from Edison, about 35 miles south of Oradell as the Garden State Parkway flies -- or crawls. His hair is blond and ringleted, like Robert Plant's, and he's outfitted in a "Hellbound" motorcycle T-shirt, black-and-white tennis shoes printed with skulls, and a gold peace sign necklace. He saw a school production of "Arsenic and Old Lace" -- pretty much his only theatrical encounter until he was almost 40. His calling card: a quarter-century of playing keyboards and singing backup vocals in the pop-metal band Bon Jovi.
So, can these guys really function together? Well, listen to them talk about the creation of "Underground," the gospel-fired opening number from "Memphis" -- the first of three musicals they've worked on since discovering about seven years ago that they were creative soul mates.
It happened this year, while they were in preliminary rehearsals for “The Toxic Avenger,” a musical they've adapted from a 1985 B-movie horror film for the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, N.J., where it premieres this fall. Bryan was on rock 'n' roll time -- running a little bit late -- as he drove to the theater.
"I'd seen the set for 'Memphis,' " he begins, "and they'd put the club in the opening scene underground. And I thought, 'Underground, that's great.' And as I'm driving, I wrote the song. I called Joe from the car: 'I got it! I got it!' He said . . ."
"I said, 'Write it down! Write it down! You're gonna lose it!' " DiPietro says, following on cue.
"I sang it to my answering machine at home, so I didn't lose it. We walked in . . . "
" 'Everybody take five,' " DiPietro continues. " 'Get away for a minute, be quiet.' "
"We went right to the piano, and -- bang -- we wrote it," Bryan says.
"It took five minutes," DiPietro says
A creative match
BESIDES being able to make songs flow in a twinkling, "Memphis" director Christopher Ashley notes, DiPietro and Bryan hang tight when collaborating becomes more knotty. "They can talk about the tough stuff," says Ashley, artistic director at the La Jolla Playhouse. "They can say, 'I really don't like that' to each other, and it's not, 'Oh my gosh, he really doesn't like my work.' "
The partnership's beginning was more organic and accidental than arranged.
In 1999, George W. George, an independent stage and film producer ("My Dinner With Andre"), had an idea for a musical based on the life of Dewey Phillips, a white Memphis disc jockey who crossed the airwaves' color barrier during the early 1950s, building a mass white audience for black music. He became the first DJ to spin an Elvis Presley record but self-destructed and wound up a small footnote to rock history.
DiPietro, a fan of early rock, wrote a script and lyrics, then began looking for a composer. "I thought, 'I would love a rock 'n' roll guy to write this, but I know zero rock 'n' roll guys.' I gave it to my agent, and it went out into the black hole, or wherever agents send scripts."
Cut to Bryan, pedaling through his morning Lifecycle routine out by the pool behind his home in Colts Neck, N.J., while he reads the "Memphis" script. Since the late 1990s he had branched out, honing his song craftsmanship by collaborating with writers outside Bon Jovi; that led to a solo gig writing songs for an unproduced musical based on "Sweet Valley High," a book series about twin teenage girls. Sweating and reading, "I heard every one of the songs that was there, heard the finished product."
OK, DiPietro said, when Bryan called and promised he could do the show justice. Put music to one of the lyrics, and we'll see. Within a day, the rocker had written and demoed "Music of My Soul," and taken the CD to Federal Express so DiPietro would get it at home in Manhattan the next day.
Recalls DiPietro: "I listened to the song once, and I said, 'I hope he's not crazy, because this is the guy.' "
When "Memphis" premiered in 2003 at North Shore Music Theatre in Massachusetts, Bryan suffered the stage jitters -- and caught the theater bug -- during a first preview attended mostly by older folks. "I literally had to move a stack of walkers over to sit down. I felt powerless. I look and say, 'We're going to get killed. It's going to be too loud, and they're going to hate it, it's just going to be so wrong.' " As it turned out, "By the end they were up and clapping and singing. The thing I forgot was that it was their time -- the 70-year-olds were 20 in 1950."
At first, "Memphis" languished as producer George tried unsuccessfully to find backers for a New York run (he died last November at 87). DiPietro and Bryan knew other producers were eager to jump in when George's option ran out, and they bided their time writing "The Toxic Avenger" and getting started on a third show, tentatively called "Chasing the Song," a fictional account of Brill Building-type songwriters in the early 1960s.
Now "Memphis" has a new life, in a co-production by the La Jolla Playhouse and the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle, where it is scheduled to open in January. In the lead role is Chad Kimball, whose credits include inhabiting a cow suit as Milky-White in "Into the Woods" at the Ahmanson in 2002 and starring on Broadway as John Lennon in "Lennon."
While grounded in rock, R&B and gospel, the show's songs are contemporary, not '50s period pieces, the co-creators say. The goal is to capture the exhilaration and sense of discovery generated by early rock 'n' roll -- while also dealing with racial boundaries that were not ready to fall, and with the self-defeating qualities DiPietro thinks are intermingled in rebels driven enough to be boundary-breakers.
Juggling acts
REHEARSALS were well along in La Jolla before Bryan finished a Bon Jovi tour and was able to leap in. Back in theater mode during a recent rehearsal, he watched the cast of more than 20 actors work up the show's rousing finale, then gave detailed suggestions, never letting go of an impish grin. "Let it rip like crazy," he urged, calling for a big, gospel-style, note-bending improvisational blowout of voices at the end.
DiPietro also has other gigs. He reports that "Nice Work If You Can Get It," his musical built around songs by George and Ira Gershwin, is in limbo for now after "a big fallout" among the original producers; Harry Connick Jr., had been announced to star as a Prohibition-era playboy. But DiPietro is pleased with the London reception last spring for his new drama about gay men's sexuality -- a show whose title is both succinctly descriptive and baldly obscene.
As their improbable Jersey connection continues, Bryan, impatient with musical-theater timetables, pronounces himself reborn to run with the partnership: "I said to Joe, 'Look, if it takes anywhere from five to eight years to go from script to getting it onstage, that's like seven more shows and I'm dead.' We've got more in us than that, so we'd better start leapfrogging the stuff."
mike.boehm@latimes.com
"Memphis," La Jolla Playhouse, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, La Jolla. 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Sept. 28. $42 to $75. (858) 550-1010.
