Will Riddle (Photo courtesy of Musical Theatre West)
Reviewed by Katie Buenneke
Musical Theatre West
Through July 27
There’s a scene in the movie Back the Future [link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_WSXXPQYeY] where Marty McFly plays “Johnny B. Goode” at a school dance in 1955 and launches into a guitar solo, then tells the crowd, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it.” Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story, now playing at Musical Theatre West in Long Beach through the end of the month, feels like if you turned that moment into a nearly three-hour biographical musical.
Buddy, written by English writer Alan Janes, and soundtracked by a couple dozen songs by Holly and his contemporaries, is one of the first “jukebox musicals,” a subgenre that has run rampant on Broadway in the past decade or so. Perhaps because it is a progenitor of the form, Janes’s book does steer clear of the most common pitfall of these types of shows, which is asking frothy songs to drive character development in a way the songs were never intended to do. Instead, it’s a diegetic musical; every song the audience hears is performed by the musician characters in either a recording studio or a concert. This is a relief in many ways; the songs, while fun, would likely buckle under even a kilogram of dramatic heft. But it does set up a trickier dynamic, which is that, in the absence of the songs propelling the story, there isn’t much of a plot at all. The end result feels a lot like watching a documentary mixed with a performance by an excellent tribute band.
The cast at MTW, directed and choreographed by Keith Andrews, are quite talented, particularly Will Riddle in the title role. Ryan O’Connell’s skilled music direction brings the songs to life vividly, especially given that the band he’s working with are the actors on stage. Kevin Clowes’ set is effective, and is vividly lit by Paul Black’s dynamic lighting.
Everyone involved with this production is doing solid work, and the show seems like a real crowd-pleaser to folks who are more familiar with Holly’s music. I only knew two of songs, “That’ll Be the Day” and “Everyday,” going in; I was more familiar with the other contemporary songs, like “Shout” by the Isley Brothers, “La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens, and “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry. I suspect Holly is better known to myself and most millennials as the namesake for a Weezer song [link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kemivUKb4f4] than for his own music.
But to someone who was not a Buddy Holly fan going in to the show, I didn’t leave it feeling like I’d learned much about Holly, and the show has a dated way of talking about race — not dated like from the late 50s, when it takes place, but dated like from the late 80s, when it was written. This is especially notable in its positioning of Holly as one of the premiere voices of rock & roll, a legacy Baz Luhrman’s Elvis biopic better explores as a primarily Black art form that gained mainstream success through white voices like Elvis and Holly. The end of the show’s first act also takes place at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, and while there are tongue-in-cheek references to Holly’s whiteness there, his and his bandmate’s presence in an important Black cultural landmark is positioned by the show as a victory and moment of racial unity, rather than an obfuscation of the true origin of the genre Holly is credited with pioneering. This is further complicated by having the finale of the show be an imagined posthumous performance of “Johnny B. Goode,” a rock song by Berry, a Black artist who is not a character in the show, making it easy for the audience to think maybe that was a Holly song too.
Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story is capably staged by the cast and crew at Musical Theatre West, but you won’t come out of it with a much better understanding of Holly and the era in which he was popular than you had going in. It seems like it’s a big hit for fans of his music, but it’s less effective for those with less familiarity.
Musical Theatre West at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, 6200 E. Atherton St., Long Beach,. Thurs., 7:30 pm; Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; mats Sat., 2 pm and Sun., 1 pm; through July 27. https://musical.org. Running time: two hours and 50 minutes, including a pre-show speech and a 20-minute intermission.
