Foreigner musical feels like the worst time
Jukebox Hero: The Musical
★★ (out of 4) Music by Foreigner. Original story by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. Musical direction and arrangements by Mark Camilleri. Staging and choreography by Parker Esse. Directed by Randy Johnson. Until Feb. 24 at the Ed Mirvish Theatre, 244 Victoria St. mirvish.com or 416-872-1212 or 1-800-461-3333
Mamma Mia! what have you wrought? ABBA might not have been the first semidormant pop franchise that didn’t really need the extra money but decided to cash in, regardless, with what has become popularly known as the “jukebox musical”: a live “greatest hits” revue wherein a given act’s most beloved tunes are strung together onstage within the context of a flimsy theatrical narrative. Sometimes that narrative is biographical or even autobiographical; sometimes that narrative is purely fanciful. Without fail, however, that narrative will be flimsy.
For the Alberta-based team that has tenaciously clung to the belief that the Foreigner catalogue deserves enshrining in the annals of musical theatre as much as those of the Beatles or Queen or the Temptations to actually see it through to the stage, further development of the idea appears to have stopped at the moment that idea became reality. Jukebox Hero: The Musical — named for the rock-’n’-roll dreams anthem “Juke Box Hero” — barely bothers to separate the words “jukebox” and “musical” in the title and exercises a similarly lazy level of effort in finding a storyline to link “Feels Like the First Time” to “Head Games” to “I Want to Know What Love Is” to “Urgent” and beyond.
It’s like someone wrote the names of the best-known Foreigner singles on cocktail napkins over dinner the night they decided they were gonna make this thing happen, moved them around on the table until they ’d hastily brainstormed a “plot” (“How do we get ‘At War With the World’ in there? I know, we’ll send one of the leads to the army!”) and then left the whole thing in essentially the same rudimentary form the moment they got the money to go ahead. You would expect better from the writing team of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who came up with passable screenplays for the musicals The Commitments and Across the Universe, but you do not get better. You do not.
Amazingly, Jukebox Hero’s hopelessly simple and cliché-ridden tale of barband brothers Ryan and Mace Perry (played earnestly by Geordie Brown and David Michael Moote, respectively), rent apart over the love of a woman and the cold machinations of the music industry in doomed steeltown Blaydon, Pennsylvania, somehow manages to be utterly confusing despite its total lack of imagination in getting from point A to B to C.
It’s linear and predictable yet still baffling, in much the same way that terrible movies don’t make sense even when there’s absolutely no room for interpretation in the story they’re putting forward. They’re just putting that story forward incompetently.
Too many characters drift in and out of the plot on the way to a big homecoming benefit show by Blaydon’s famous expat rocker Ryan, their melodramatic motivations unclear, and by the end of the thing, they’ve all remained so cardboard that you’re not really rooting for any of them to do anything — except, perhaps, stop over-singing Foreigner tunes en masse every two minutes.
Oh, and the less said about this mess’s running gag about kids today and their addiction to social media, the better. It’s freakin’ painful, as if the same classicrock fan who stopped paying attention to new music after Agent Provocateur and was, thus, thirsting for a Foreigner musical had also sealed himself off from the forward march of technology for the past 35 years.
Back to that over-singing: most of the cast sang flat a good 60 or 70 per cent of the time during the “official world premiere” of Jukebox Hero at Toronto’s Ed Mirvish Theatre on Thursday night. Yes, that’s probably testament to the tremendous vocal range of original Foreigner vocalist Lou Gramm, who attended with principal songwriter and show co-producer Mick Jones on Thursday, but maybe a more respectful tribute to his talents would have been to leave the material alone in the first place.
Everyone in the cast gives it a good go, but most came off on Thursday as trying too hard to “rock out” while the band arrayed on catwalks and inside glass cubes around them only ever mustered a tastefully prim and mild approximation of the same. Maybe this passes as rock ’n’ roll for people who haven’t been to a rock show since the advent of the internet, but you’d probably be better off catching one of the present-day iterations of Foreigner, the band, at a casino somewhere.
Foreigner did have a lot of badass songs back in the day, though. That’s the one clear takeaway from Jukebox Hero: The Musical. There are far more hits than you remember, from “Double Vision” to “Dirty White Boy” to “Hot Blooded,” but it’s probably better to remember them as they were than having those memories forever tarnished by this muddled and unnecessary monument to their greatness.