Reviews round-up of Stereophonic in the West End – Duke of York’s Theatre London

"1970s rock drama is a sublime, five-star hit"

"David Adjmi’s Tony-winning play about a Fleetwood Mac-style band comes to London’s Duke of York’s Theatre"

"David Adjmi’s superb, gorgeously textured drama — which scooped a hatful of Tony Awards after its first New York run and is brilliantly staged here by Daniel Aukin and an outstanding cast — sinks us into the creative fever dream that follows, as weeks spool into months and the makeshift family of artists tears itself apart in pursuit of perfection."

"The natural comparison is Fleetwood Mac, but the play’s scope is bigger than that. And while sagas of backstage bust-ups and troubled artists are nothing new, Adjmi brings something deeper, steeping us in the granular detail of the creative process: the craft and the graft, the exhausted wrangling and the sudden soaring ecstasy of the perfect take."

"... it’s a drama about music — what it means to us, why we care — including that strange alchemy by which personal pain and discord can produce extraordinary art."

"None of it would work without an exceptional cast, all of whom play or sing, and all of whom trace their characters’ shifting emotional states in incremental, often understated detail."

"Adjmi’s script comes in somewhere between Chekhov and the slow-burn dramas of Annie Baker, gradually building towards something much greater than the sum of its parts."

"70s band saga is an extraordinary, electrifying odyssey"

"This stunningly rendered tale of a band on the brink of creative genius or total meltdown is a triumph, with a standout cast and score"

"As the play’s fictional band gathers behind the glass, the dramatic possibilities of their pressurised containment are immediate."

"Director Daniel Aukin’s production is as exacting and truthful as the script itself. Sounds and voices overlap as mic channels are opened and closed; silences are underscored with boredom and exhaustion. In between the kit-tinkering and longueurs are moments of creative transcendence, including a late-night epiphany so electrifying that the sound waves will excite your internal organs."

"At more than three hours, the run time can feel as indulgent as one of Pink Floyd’s longer tracks – but this is an extraordinary allegory for artistic perfectionism and the destruction it leaves in its wake."

"A music studio masterpiece"

"It is almost existential in its concerns, yet its overlapping, quickfire dialogue is both funny, pungent and entirely naturalistic. I think it is a masterpiece. Its cleverness lies in the way that David Zinn’s set places the action entirely within the confines of a recording studio."

"The action is teased out slowly, over three hours. You can see where scenes could be cut. But this immersive detail, of something being made as you watch and listen, means that Stereophonic gradually accrues significance. Daniel Aukin’s gently controlled direction and the tautness of the writing, let the play’s significance shine in the gaps between the music. It doesn’t tell you about its characters; it shows you the effect of their personalities."

"Each character changes in the course of the play, shifts subtly marked by Enver Chakartash’s costumes. Some things are refreshingly unexpected."

"As a production Stereophonic is full of radical decisions, reflected in the drama of Aukin’s staging"

"A fine-grained, audacious work"

"The Broadway hit about a Seventies band trying to record their new album, hits the West End in (flared) style"

"It’s a fine-grained, audacious work full of overlapping dialogue and bold use of silence and repetition amid the emotional flashpoints, not to mention some terrific songs that sound exactly like pop-rock hits from the era by Grammy winner Will (Arcade Fire) Butler. However, the play’s dedication to unpicking the creative process and the collapse of relationships – even the banal, scrappy, noodly bits – mean it’s also baggy and meandering."

"Daniel Aukin’s production is hugely accomplished and involving with fine performances – musical as well as actorly – from a Transatlantic cast. But over here I suspect audiences, like the two engineers, will wish everyone would just get a move on."

"The show captures the sleepless grind and tedium of recording but also the euphoria when the sound comes together. And it’s full of delightful, random tangents about custard and peacocks, Don’t Look Now vs Last Tango in Paris. Stereophonic is hugely engrossing and enjoyable, but like the band’s album, it could lose a few fiddly bits and a few minutes."

"David Adjmi’s Broadway smash about the recording of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ is a remarkably compelling three hours"

"Of course, it is a great subject for a play. The story of how erstwhile blues noodlers Fleetwood Mac recorded one of the greatest pop albums in history, while breaking up with each other, while on drugs isn’t simply a bit of pop trivia: it’s a parable on the nature of the creative process."

"It’s an incredibly tricky story to tell in a way that doesn’t come across all VH1 Behind the Music. But Stereophonic carries it off spectacularly well."

"... Daniel Aukin’s production hinges on the songs written for it being good enough to feel credible, which is pretty audacious."

"There is a lot about gender and power here. If the broad brushstroke picture is ‘band makes an album’, the more nuanced one is ‘two talented women try to assert themselves in a toxic male-dominated creative environment’."

"It’s worth stressing that Stereophonic is extremely entertaining, because it’s a show about seven great characters"

"... the damage these people did to each other in the name of art is brought home with devastating eloquence."

"Broadway hit Stereophonic is the closest you will come to being in the studio with Fleetwood Mac"

"David Adjmi’s deft Tony-winner about the struggles of a 1970s band arrives in the West End with spliffs, tiffs and finely tuned performances"

"There’s no small pressure, then, on Daniel Aukin’s hit production and the West End cast (including three key players from the New York run) to wow us. Do they? Yes, up to a considerable point. Stereophonic is an original, if obvious idea, executed with elan – yet it also feels a touch two-dimensional."

"In its huge favour: after three hours of eavesdropping on a lovingly recreated retro recording studio (anachronistic Yamaha monitors aside), you’ll likely emerge from the theatre feeling elated and attached to the unnamed band"

"Laying aside the controversy, Stereophonic clearly broaches creative struggle more broadly – the way pain can yield artistic gain, but also the human cost of going for broke."

"It’s best to tune into the finely calibrated performances, and luxuriate in warm nostalgia for that colourful, flare-trousered era, blighted though it was, as we’re reminded, by addled brains and chauvinist thinking."

"Stereophonic is a compelling, stylish portrait of 1970s rock in the making"

"West End welcomes the Tony-winning musical after a banging Broadway run"

"There’s a distinct, unhurried fascination that comes with watching a band thrash out a new album in the recording studio"

"It’s slow-moving and intense, the stasis only broken by carefully rationed bursts of music by Arcade Fire’s Will Butler."

"As Diana, Karczewski is full of pleasing contradictions, poised but full of adolescent sulkiness and dependence, too"

"Adjmi’s script has a feminist thrust to it, showing how Peter stifles his girlfriend’s musical talents, selling off her hard-won guitar before she can learn to play it. Maybe it’s sexism, or maybe it’s just a fear of any talent that might overshadow his own."

"These songs are private things, Adjmi shows us, scrawled in a diary in a moment of pain, trying to reach places ordinary words can’t reach. We shouldn’t really watch – but we can’t look away."

"I’ve just seen the two best hours of theatre this year"

"Stereophonic is an absorbing, amusing epic — and I’d watch it again in a heartbeat"

"I’ve just seen two of the best hours of theatre of the year. Does it matter that they were preceded by another hour of theatre that took its own sweet time?"

"... I do wonder, looking back at Stereophonic, how much the extraordinary emotional detonations of its final half owe something to its rambling introduction."

"The director Daniel Aukin makes it all plausible and propulsive. The designer David Zinn makes that studio so real you feel you could lean forward and operate the faders yourself. Could they have got to the great stuff an easier way? Sure, in a perfect world. Yet Adjmi has an angle on perfection — that it’s less important than something that’s alive, that makes you feel"

"Stereophonic doesn’t rush. Yet it’s so absorbing, affecting and amusing I’d see it again in a heartbeat."

"Watching stunning biopic Stereophonic is the closest I've ever felt to being a rock star"

"New show Stereophonic is rumoured to be inspired by one of the most famous bands of all time - drugs, drama and all."

"Performed by a superlative cast, David Adjmi's multiple Tony Awards-garlanded Broadway smash about an unnamed Anglo-American five-piece is jumbo bags of fun, fuelled by even bigger bags of coke, dope and gallons of whisky, merrily mixed with explosive creative and relationship clashes."

"We may be sat in a Victorian theatre in London's West End but for over three hours we are transported across an ocean and back in time. It's pure magic."

"Across 195 meandering minutes we're gripped, immersed in the lives of artists who need each other and yet know that need, both personal and professional, is destroying them. We feel like we've lived every moment with them, plunged into the magic, madness and misery. The agony and ecstasy of creation laid bare. Unforgettable."

"It won five Tonys but this drama badly needs an edit"

"This much-lauded and overlong Broadway show may not be an instant classic, but rock nerds will enjoy the tale of one band’s travails in the recording studio"

"If it were an LP, David Adjmi’s much-lauded Broadway play about a Seventies rock band’s travails in the recording studio would be a triple-disc whopper with a bonus EP tucked inside."

"The performances are first-rate, and David Zinn’s set really does make you feel as if you have a seat on the mixing desk. Yet at over three hours long it’s burdened with far too many longueurs."

"Adjmi has gone out of his way to play down the parallels with Fleetwood Mac’s rise to world domination. But it’s impossible to ignore the echoes as the Anglo-American musicians bicker, experiment and fall in and out of love with each other."

"You do get one or two tantalising insights into how the beginning of a riff can turn into an actual song."

"Enver Chakartash’s costumes capture the era perfectly. Rock nerds will certainly get a kick out of the behind-the-scenes ambience. It’s all very cool, but is this play chart-topping material? I don’t think so."

"Insightful and crammed with texture"

"Broadway smash chronicling the making of a 1970s band’s breakthrough album hits the high notes"

"In David Adjmi’s drama, there’s creative excitement and devouring ambition – but the overriding emotions are fear, need and loneliness."

"... Adjmi’s play with songs arrives in the West End to feverish anticipation; ironically, the stakes feel almost as vertiginous as those faced by the Fleetwood Mac-ish group at its centre. Does it live up to the hype? Well, it’s insightful and crammed with texture"

"It’s sensitively directed by Daniel Aukin and the acting, from an ensemble that includes three of the original Broadway cast, feels faultlessly real and flavoursome. But in electing to give us a piece that dwells on the painful, mundane minutiae, Adjmi is authentic almost to a fault: with a protracted running time, the play has the languorous quality of an unedited documentary and, however persuasive the execution, the screaming frustration of its characters sometimes becomes contagious."