Still rockin'
Huey Lewis' rom-com musical lands on Broadway
After Huey Lewis learned that a syndrome of the inner ear called Ménière's disease had caused him significant hearing loss and left him unable to play or hear music, he faced the difficult task of having to tell his friends and peers.
Marin's homegrown star, whose wry lyrics and rumbling vocals powered Reagan-era pop hits like “I Want a New Drug” and “If This Is It,” turned to people like Tico Torres, the longtime Bon Jovi drummer, whom he'd gotten to know on golfing trips. But their conversation proved to be an unexpected source of the pragmatic philosophy that Lewis built his career on.
Over a breakfast interview last month, Lewis delivered a lively, solo re-enactment of that fateful talk with Torres.
“He goes, `Hey, Huey, how ya doing?'” Lewis recalled. “I say, `Tico, it's not good.' And I begin to explain. I said, `I've lost my hearing and I can't hear pitch. I can't sing.'”
“I'm telling him the whole
story and he's going like this” — here, Lewis lowered his head, furrowed his bushy brows over his eyeglasses and shook his head in dismay. Slipping into an imitation of Torres' New Jersey accent, Lewis said, “When I finish, he goes, `Whaddaya gonna do?'”
“So that's my mantra,”
Lewis continued. “What are you going to do? Really, it's a pretty good question. I don't know. Still working on it.”
Lewis had already halted
his performing career before he went public with his diagnosis in 2020. But while his relationship to his art has fundamentally changed, he has continued to work on a new Broadway musical, “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” which is built around many of the songs he made famous with Huey Lewis and the News.
The musical, which opens April 22 at the James Earl
Jones Theatre in New York, spins Lewis' tunes like “Hip
to Be Square,” “Workin' for a Livin'” and the title track into a fictional story set in the 1980s about a couple (played by Corey Cott and McKenzie Kurtz) torn between pop-star ambitions and corporate opportunities.
It is a project more than a decade in the making, one that began before Lewis learned about the disease that has upended his life and given the musical an unexpected sense of urgency.