With The Heart of Rock and Roll, Huey Lewis Is Feeling the Power of Love on Broadway
(Photo by Luis Ferrá)
The Heart of Rock and Roll, the new Broadway musical built around the music of Huey Lewis and the News, is set in the 1980s.
Of course it is. Slick, positive and as garishly, irresistibly catchy as a Koosh ball, the band’s recorded output—“The Power of Love,” “Stuck On You” and “If This Is It,” just for starters—ruled the airwaves and MTV that decade, earning them Grammy Awards along with multi-platinum sales. (Last September marked the 40th anniversary of Sports, the album that American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman called “a flawless masterpiece.”)
It was a great time for music lovers. “Music was a much larger part of our lives,” Lewis told Tamsen Fadal on The Broadway Show, speaking at the Rum House. “There was only one avenue to success if you were a musician and wanted to play your own music—and that was a hit top 40 record.”
The new musical follows Bobby, the frontman of a struggling rock band who gives up his rock-star dreams and gets a job at a corrugated box company. (Cue: “Hip to Be Square.”) He falls in love with the boss’s daughter, Cassandra, and moves up in the company. And then his old band gets the break they’d been waiting for. It’s a feel-good romantic comedy set to some of the most feel-good tunes of the Reagan era.
Not every Huey Lewis and the News track was relentlessly upbeat: “Walking On a Thin Line” addressed post-traumatic stress disorder, while “Forest for the Trees” touched on depression. But for the most part, Lewis said, “Our stuff is ‘up.’ By and large, we're trying to cheer people up. Lord knows that the world is a tough enough place as it is. Why not cheer people up?”
It’s also cheering for Lewis—who, due to a rare ear affliction called Ménière’s, has essentially lost his hearing—to know that Broadway audiences will soon get to enjoy the old songs. “I really don't think there's anything like live musical theater,” he said. “It’s so rewarding for performers and the audience is just wonderful. I love it.”
