The result was that, as the years passed, and rock fans got old and rich enough to patronize Broadway, there were few old shows to revive for them. (READ: Corliss on the Encores! 2001 revival of Hair)
Broadway musicals went the serioso route, and rarely generated songs anyone under 50 would want to remember. Hair, the “love-rock musical” that spawned four top-five hits when it landed on the Great White Way in 1968, might have restored the connection, but that was a fluke. For three decades, from the 1920s through the ’50s, Broadway songs were top-of-the-charts hits then Elvis and his kin sent radio music into the mixed-race vernacular, while Broadway composers hewed to the old models, or went artsy à la Stephen Sondheim. One of the minor tragedies of Broadway in the past half-century is that it almost never tapped into the pop music of the rock ‘n roll era.
Though it has moments where it rises to fun-awful status, with a hideous giddiness that turns moviegoers into rubbernecking motorists at a crash site, it’s mostly just awful. If the film were a Broadway-bound show, it would have closed out of town. But director Adam Shankman’s movie - based on Chris D’Arienzo’s Broadway musical that was filled with ’80s anthems and set in the teeming West Hollywood rock scene of the Whiskey a Go Go nightclub (here called the Bourbon) - is so willfully bad that not even Cruise’s valiant CPR can help. An icon and parody of the preening pop star, he might be mad - his roadie says, “He just told me to turn the radio off… the radio in his head” - or simply weary of inhabiting the lurid cartoon that is Stacee Jaxx.Īs played with an awesomely deranged intensity by Tom Cruise, Stacee has the creepy-sexy pulse that might have given Rock of Ages some cinematic life.
Sporting an autobiography of body tattoos (pistols at his hips, a flying bat on his upper back), Jaxx struts like a centaur with the back end cut off and admits emotional intimacy to no creature but his pet baboon. Front man for the ’80s hair-metal band Arsenal, he has plunged deep into the pool of his legend and hit bottom. Follow fear the aging rock god Stacee Jaxx.
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