Review: Rock & Roll Man Celebrates Alan Freed, the DJ Who Played Black Music for White Teens

In the ongoing quest to memorialize with a stage musical seemingly every major American recording artist, we often relegate the agents, producers, record executives, and DJs to bit parts (Phil Spector has practically become a stock character in jukebox musicals set in the ’60s). If this is something that troubles you, check out the new musical Rock & Roll Man, which is now making its off-Broadway premiere at New World Stages. It tells the story of the popularization of rock and roll by recounting the life of a man who was instrumental in that breakthrough, Cleveland radio DJ Alan Freed.

Freed was among the inaugural class of inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (appropriately located in Cleveland) and is widely credited with the creation of term “rock and roll.” His enthusiasm for spinning the records of Black artists on what were implicitly white radio stations helped desegregate the airwaves and accelerated a period of musical cross-pollination that still bears fruit today. He’s a significant figure in American music, and like all human beings, a significantly flawed one. Can we count on this biomusical to unpack the lingering ambivalence around Freed’s legacy while placing his behavior in the context of a bygone time and place? Of course not.

The book (by Gary Kupper, Larry Marshak, and Rose Caiola) sticks to the self-serving-memoir-with-songs model pioneered by longtime New World Stages resident Jersey Boys and taken to new heights of shamelessness in productions like Tina and The Cher Show. Rock & Roll Man is particularly upfront about its apologia by framing Freed’s biography through an imaginary trial in the “court of public opinion,” The World versus Alan Freed. J. Edgar Hoover (Bob Ari, valiantly playing every killjoy old white man) serves as prosecutor, with Little Richard (an exuberantly zany Rodrick Covington) as defense counsel. We need not peer above the title (the subject’s daughter-in-law, Colleen Freed, is listed as a producer) to know who will win.

Between opening arguments and final gavel, Freed’s story is ornamented with songs that would have appeared on his radio show or in one of his popular live concerts: “Tutti Frutti,” “Yakety Yak,” and “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” march in this parade of vintage rock hits. Chuck Berry (a lively Matthew S. Morgan) even performs “Roll Over Beethoven” (“Johnny B. Goode” is presumably already engaged over at the Winter Garden). Kupper has written additional songs to keep the narrative flowing, resulting in a frankenmusical of disparate styles stitched together.

Director Randal Myler keeps the story charging forward with a frantic staging that gives the viewer very little time to consider any complicating factors to the Freed-approved narrative, with Tim Mackabee’s two-level set serving as a platform for Stephanie Klemons’s irresistibly joyful choreography and top-notch vocal performances (music direction by Dave Keyes). The lights shift (lighting by Matthew Richards and Aja M. Jackson) and we’re off to another scene or song. Rock and Roll Man is at its best when it embraces its lunacy, like when Little Richard arrives licking chocolate-vanilla swirl ice cream cone while pushing a cart that reads “dairy queen.” We are reminded of the high fantasy of this exercise, and cannot help but laugh.

The cast is certainly game: Valisia Lekae is radiant as LaVern Baker, while Eric B Turner turns in several impressive vocal performances, especially as Bo Diddley. Andy Christopher is equally convincing as both Buddy Holly and Pat Boone; and Anna Hertel is sympathetic as Alana, Alan’s neglected daughter (this is also becoming a stock role in these musicals).

Constantine Maroulis leads the cast as Freed, delivering both the vocal pyrotechnics and wide-eyed earnestness that have earned him dominance in a boutique niche of musical theater. “These are consulting fees with no strings attached,” he explains in a Senate hearing on the subject of payments he received from record companies. And we can tell that he sincerely believes it.

Freed’s acceptance of payola presents the most obvious pathway to dramatically interesting questions: What convinces a radio DJ that he deserves a little kickback for playing a certain label’s songs on the air? More seriously, why is it acceptable that some of these payments came in the form of royalties, with Freed credited as co-writer, essentially enriching himself every time he put needle to vinyl? Unfortunately, the writers don’t pursue this thread, painting Freed as a naive victim of circumstance, thrown under the bus while much bigger baddies got away. That may be true, but one suspects Freed had more complicated motivations than the pure desire to bring Black music to the white masses.

A reexamination of those motives is perhaps too much to ask from a show like Rock & Roll Man, a cavalcade of old hits dressed up in chintzy period costumes (by Leon Dobkowski) and physics-defying wigs (by Kelley Jordan). If you’re an older theatergoer, you pay the price of admission in hopes of recapturing a little bit of your youth through the staged presentation of the songs that underscored it. In that way, Rock and Roll Man serves the same purpose as Jersey Boys, Beautiful, and any number of boomer nostalgia acts that have come and gone over the past two decades. By no means the worst of these jukebox musicals, it nevertheless fails to distinguish itself.