The Broadway musicals “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Illinoise” and “The Heart of Rock and Roll” offer distinct pleasures.
NEW YORK — Pop music has a lot to say about growing up. Chances are your favorite artists at the time dispensed a lesson or two about finding your path and weathering its assorted heartbreaks.
All three shows richly enhance familiar tunes to fit a range of instruments and voices: Their music supervisors, orchestrators and arrangers are the true, and often unsung, MVPs. And they provide distinct pleasures, thanks to some combination of talent onstage and off, commitment to a vibe and inventiveness in going beyond dutiful fan service to deliver something more surprising.
Music supervisor Adam Blackstone, with collaborators Tom Kitt and Keys , transforms anthemic hits like “Girl on Fire” and “Empire State of Mind” into sternum-rattling production numbers featuring fly, fast-footed choreography by Camille A. Brown. Just as affecting are lone-character-at-the-piano torch songs, or unexpected treatments of ballads like “Fallin’” and “No One,” that expand the flood of feelings that Keys’ music can unleash.
Dreams of tearing up the stage with his forsaken bandmates distract Bobby from more grown-up ambitions in “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” an audaciously goofy new musical that has become the eyebrow-raisingof the season. Set to the new wavy power pop of Huey Lewis and the News, the show isn’t exactly betting it all on the modest celebrity of its namesake, who greeted a handful of patrons outside the James Earl Jones Theater on Monday when I attended the press opening.
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