Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals

High Fidelity

At the climax of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the musical about the healing power of pop music, Hedwig sings ‘‘Midnight Radio ,’’ a reassuring power anthem about community and connection for those who love rock and roll. And the three central characters of High Fidelity, Rob, Dick, and Barry, are the guys Hedwig is singing to. To them, music is life. Unlike most musicals , High Fidelity is not a love story; it’s not about whether Rob and his girlfriend Laura will get back together. This is a story about one man and his struggle to grow up, to learn to put others first. Rob is on a classic hero’s quest to find his own best self, and rock and roll is there to help him. High Fidelity is a story about experiencing music autobiographically , about using music to connect to others, about how music makes your personal pain somehow transcendent, but also about how music cannot supplant real life. What better forminwhichtotellthatstorythanarockmusical?Inthiscase, the form of storytelling is as important as the story itself—it is told in music, exclusively from Rob’s point of view, and the narrator and hero are the same person, even though the hero has virtually no self-knowledge through much of the story. In the book Jung and Shakespeare, Barbara Rogers-Gardner describes Hamlet in a way that illuminates Rob as well: ‘‘All through the play, Hamlet has to look to others for identity, for knowledge of himself, and fails to find it. When he compares himself to others, he can suffer only pain and humiliation. Ultimately, philosophic abstractions do not solve his problem; only what Jung calls maturation can do that, and Hamlet runs out of time before maturation can occur.’’ But Rob doesn’t. Given all that, what better way to construct this score than in the musical vocabulary and language of Rob’s life? Rob doesn’t have a voice of his own yet, but his favorite artists can speak for him. The show’s creators, Tom Kitt (music), Amanda Green (lyrics), and David Lindsay-Abaire (book) avoided the mistake that too many movies-to-musicals make: instead of rewriting the screenplay for the stage, they found a new form for this story that is organic to its narrative. Instead of just putting a movie up on stage and sticking some songs into it (as too many have done, for example, The Full Monty, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . High Fidelity High Fidelity [ 225 Big, Urban Cowboy, and others), this team created something original that has a life—and rules—of its own. This show traffics in genuine rock and roll, with a score that delivers dramatically but that is also peppered with musical references to some of the great rock and pop artists of our time, the muscular American rock sound of Bruce Springsteen, the raw rage of Guns N’ Roses, the intellectual playfulness of Talking Heads, the fierce defiance of Aretha Franklin, the smoky groove of Percy Sledge, the naked emotion of Ben Folds, the driving cynicism of Billy Joel. But the use of music isn’t always straightforward; sometimes it’s ironic, even snide. Since we’re witnessing this story through the filter of Rob’s mind, the musical models for the various songs in the show even tell us how Rob feels about the people singing, through the voices and sounds his subconscious mind assigns to them. This score isn’t just pastiche for its own sake, a crazy quilt of past musical sounds; this is a show that uses music as carefully and cleverly as it uses dialogue to tell its story— comically, sarcastically, and also movingly. Though some will object to the label, the music of High Fidelity is the music of the so-called slackers, America’s latest Lost Generation, those on the cusp between the Baby Boomers and Generation X, men (usually) for whom popular music forges a deep emotional connection in ways that most people would never understand, men who choose not to play by the majority rules, rejecting money, family, and career as life goals, in favor of an obsessive dedication to the music of their lives. In Nick Hornby’s novel on which the High Fidelity movie and musical were based, Rob says: It’s not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous , move...