NEW YORK — Cameron Crowe’s widely adored “Almost Famous,” an affectionate ode to the transformative power of rock music, is a movie about a shy teenage kid finding his voice. But in the first moments of the new Broadway musical based on the iconic 2000 movie, there’s our 15-year-old hero William Miller, emotionally over-actualized by Casey Likes, singing his face right off like he’s in “Dear Evan Hansen.”
“HEY-EY-EY-EY,” he goes, hitting the high notes of Tom Kitt’s melodic score.
This makes perfect sense in a musical; protagonists have to let you know they’re here, they can sing and they have a problem. But it’s indicative, really, of one of the two intractable problems faced by “Almost Famous,” which opened on Broadway last week at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.
In the film, teenage William is a fan who uses the music of others to self-actualize. In the film, his surrogate father, the critic Lester Bangs, instructs him not just on the rules of cultural journalism — never let the artists co-opt you through their drinks, girls or drugs — but on the central paradox of rock music itself.
The art, he says, is a constant epic battle between phony pretension and honest truth. And great rock writers have to be hyper-aware of the seductive temptation that can destroy their work: You cannot shill for respectability for a form that is “gloriously and righteously dumb.”
But in a Broadway musical with a traditional structure like this one, no such gradual awakening is really possible.
There’s another issue, of course. As a film made back in 2000, “Almost Famous” was as inherently nonjudgmental of behavior as it was discerning of true art. Its groupies are all teenagers, and in some cases, barely that. The main fictional band Stillwater and their various sidekicks is made up of lovable doofuses who can’t believe their luck. William falls in love with the groupie Penny Lane, but he also is group-gifted with the loss of his own virginity.
That’s all fraught now and the musical really had no alternative but to smooth out as many of those rough edges as possible, to glide over the issues of sexuality and age and power and all of the other things that the great critic Bangs never thought much about.
Anyone who doesn’t like “Almost Famous,” the musical, on the grounds that it lacks the intellectual edge, sexual tension and anarchic fun of the movie, and there will be those people, needs to realize that there was no choice now. The world has spun forward, and both artists and critics have to go along with the ride.
Other versions of this same issue are causing any number of Broadway musicals based on older movies endless levels of angst: How do you honor the older film and yet also follow today’s rules? You can’t, and yet you must.
Another paradox, Bangs would have rightly said.
The safer road here was to see “Almost Famous” not so much as a coming-of-age story amid the bacchanal of touring rock (as did the movie), but as a fable of a broken family that needs to be put back together (in fairness, that theme was there too in the film, secondarily). Kitt’s great talent for the musical depiction of lost souls yearning to be made whole is thus put to good use.
I don’t mean to imply that the show is not a good time, because it comes with plenty of gentle, well-crafted fun for most audience members, including the famous plane scene and other amusing musical and textual nods to great scenes from the film that had superfans chortling with warm memory.
Kitt has written some lovely songs, including a beautiful one for Penny Lane (Solea Pfeiffer) wherein she dreams of “Morocco” and a sweet ballad for William’s mom Elaine, “Listen to Me.” And the show also rocks out in sophisticated musical homage to its not-so-sophisticated era.
But “Almost Famous” the musical, which features a perfectly likable book and lyrics by Crowe himself, is, dramaturgically speaking, not unlike “Mary Poppins,” with lumbering, big-haired musicians substituting for a British nanny.
The excellent Chris Wood, who plays the slowly reforming rock star Russell Hammond, leans deftly into his role as a man-child who learns how to take better care of younger people, be they his lovers or the kid putting him on the cover of Rolling Stone. And as William’s mother, Elaine, Aneka Larsen is strong enough as a performer to help propel her character to the center of the story. Like any good mom, she just wants her absent son to be able to find his way back home, just like Frankie Valli in “Jersey Boys.”
Fully competent and coherent, “Almost Famous” has a lively book, a rich score, many skilled and engaging performers and a nicely droll visual pallet from the designers Derek McLane, David Zinn and Natasha Katz. But when Penny Lane overdoses, the pain of that moment is brushed over with a nervous joke. That’s also true of William’s sexual awakening and, ultimately, even the rebellion of sister Anita Miller (Emily Schultheis). Irony and pain only rarely enter the building.
And just Rob Colletti’s Bangs appears wholly true to the real rock deal. But then he is a bit of a dinosaur with all that yak about truth and authenticity.
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At the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th St.; almostfamousthemusical.com
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