“Stereophonic,” David Adjmi’s Broadway play about a ’70s rock band, unfolds in a casual recording studio in Sausalito. The walls are oak-paneled. The chairs are beanbags. Through a window spanning the back of the stage, audiences can see the recording space, or “live room,” which is cluttered with guitars and electrical cords. A system of microphones carries sound between the live room, the control room and the audience.
At the center of this strange loop sits audio engineer Grover (Jack Barrett), twiddling dials on the mixer. His job is to clean up the sound. When the band members start to squabble in the live room, he just mutes them. If only it were always that easy to silence competing voices.
“Most Tony-Nominated Play of All Time!” proclaims the marquee outside the Curran Theatre, where “Stereophonic” runs through Nov. 23. The implication is that you’d better love “Stereophonic” too, because if you don’t, you are wrong.
Then again, maybe a little gaslighting is the only way to get a show of this scope produced. Even after being cut down for this touring production, “Sterephonic” is meaty — the four acts total nearly three hours. “Am I bored?” you might begin to wonder in the third act, as the band gears up to record yet another song. Maybe you’re just tired. Hey, are the lights flickering in here, or is that just a reflection off the guitar?
On the topic of gaslighting, no one does it better than Peter (Denver Milord), the band’s insecure lead guitarist, who spends most of the play trying to convince his wife, Diana (Claire DeJean), to cut verses from the songs she’s written. They weigh down the albums, he insists. Of course, they’re also the band’s only top hits.
Admirably, Diana refuses to shorten her songs. Not so admirably, she nourishes her husband’s narcissism in a lukewarm broth of unearned praise and wifely self-abasement. “I have low self-confidence,” she reminds him more than once.
The rest of the band is no help. Bass player Reg (Christopher Mowod) is generally too drug-addled to express artistic opinions, if he even has any. The energy of Mowod’s performance is captured perfectly by drummer Simon (Cornelius McMoyler) when he accuses Reg of being a “sad man in a blanket.” Indeed, Reg spends most of the first act wrapped pathetically in a tasseled throw.
Simon, for his part, occasionally pushes back against Peter’s controlling tendencies, but only because he just wants the freedom to do his own thing. Against this group of man-children, keyboard player Holly (Emilie Kouatchou) can’t really do much except purse her lips and dish out insults in a smart London accent.
The show relies almost exclusively on the tonal shift that happens whenever Grover starts the tape rolling — one second everyone’s making death threats and the next they’re making music together. At one point, Peter and Diana conduct an entire screaming match in between the takes of a vocal backing track. They harmonize sweetly, pause, then proceed to rip their vocal cords out.
Clearly, these people are not good for each other, but at least the music is excellent. Composer Will Butler delivers a convincing pastiche of ’70s soft rock, although the best songs are those that foreground DeJean’s more contemporary-sounding vocals. “Drive,” a midtempo ballad buried in the middle of the second act, ends on such a height of rapture that it leaves several seconds of reverent silence in its wake.
“Stereophonic” might have ended at the 90-minute mark and released its audience into the night feeling teary-eyed and meditative. But there’s more. It’s worth noting that Adjmi’s script is partially inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s recording of its 1977 album, Rumours, which lends the thing a documentary feel. Like it or not, it’s a tell-all.
For the sort of person who insists on listening to albums all the way through, a three-hour dramatization of a fictional rock album is a dream come true. And there’s a good argument that the length of “Stereophonic” correlates with the depth of our investment in it.
As for those who find their enthusiasm fizzling out, that’s okay too. Remember that even the band can’t get to the end of the show without a lot of cocaine.