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Don’t Think Too Hard About The Heart of Rock and Roll
The Huey Lewis musical is fine, fun, and as lightweight as a cardboard box.
The core ethos of The Heart of Rock and Roll might be best expressed in an early scene by the musical’s exasperated head of HR, played by Tamika Lawrence, who accedes to its peppy hero’s scheming by shrugging and saying, “Fine! The gist of it is this: Our hero, Bobby (Corey Cott), used to be an aspiring rock star but has given it up to work at a cardboard-box factory; I’m pretty sure the choice of product is to justify an assembly-line take on “It’s Hip to Be Square.” Bobby’s boss, Mr. Stone (John Dossett), runs the place with his uptight daughter, Paige (McKenzie Kurtz), but the finances are iffy, so they (Lawrence’s HR woman, Roz, included) all end up going to the 1987 Midwest Packaging Convention in Chicago, where they court business from the magnate of IDEA Home Furnishings named Fjord (Orville Mendoza, whose dialogue may as well be “bork bork”) and where Paige also runs into her peroxide Wasp ex-boyfriend Tucker (Billy Harrigan Tighe). Dossett provides the show with what little grounding it has emotionally — there’s a convoluted backstory to his floundering family business that he flecks with human-scale pathos — but there’s little message to latch onto, aside from the ever-generic admonition to follow your heart and, of course, believe in the “Power of Love” (a song also being performed a few blocks over in Back to the Future, where there are more special effects but fewer good jokes).
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