“It’s a torture to need people.” The despairing line applies to every member of an allegedly fictional band that (one lawsuit later) definitely, categorically isn’t… well, possibly, indirectly might maybe be… ah hell, is blatantly based on Fleetwood Mac and the tortured, torturously protracted creation of their defining 1977 album Rumours.
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.
The magnificently 1970s brown recording studio with period-perfect mixing desks and furniture fills the stage. A play with music rather than a musical, Arcade Fire’s Will Butler pens the impressively believable snatches of songs. The virtuosic actors also play all the instruments behind the full-length glass partitions.
When Holly, Diana and Peter (Nia Towle, Lucy Karczewski and Tom Pecinka), who are, ahem, ‘rumoured’ to be channelling Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham, start to sing it is rapturously beautiful.
The latter two’s toxically unhealthy, co-dependent love finally implodes in a breathtaking scene where the three flawlessly harmonise repeated takes in between the couple furiously screaming at each other.
Zachary Hart’s bassist Reg (shhh, John McVie) car crash careers between substance abuse and evangelising healthy eating and psychobabble. The Broadway production’s Chris Stack as the dandy daddy figure Simon (cough, Mick Fleetwood) manfully wrestles with a plummy Brit accent and absolutely dominates the drums, masking his pain as his wife and children slip away.
Fellow Broadway transfers Andrew R Butler and Eli Gelb complete the ensemble as the genuinely fictional engineers, laconically weary Charlie – desperately trying to hide his lack of experience and maintain his cool in the face of egomaniac geniuses – and the adorably awkward Grover.
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.
STEREOPHONIC: THE DUKE OF YORK’S THEATRE TO SEPTEMBER 13