Rolling Thunder, which opened Thursday at New World Stages, is a curious exercise in boomer nostalgia — a jarring blend of jukebox musical and tribute-band concert that evokes the Vietnam era in story, images, and song and shares many of its contradictions. The biggest draw here is the collection of recognizable hits from the ’60s and ’70s that have been assembled, from Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” to the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” to Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” to the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” They capture different flavors of that turbulent era, and they’re well executed by a talented cast of singers and an on-stage five-piece band led by music director Sonny Paladino (who also did the sometimes oddball arrangements and orchestrations, with Chong Lim).
The six actor-singers are meant to represent aspects of the Vietnam experience, and several assume multiple roles throughout the evening. The broad-shouldered Drew Becker plays a Nebraska farm boy named Johnny who joins the Army seeking his “one big chance for adventure” — leaving behind a high school sweetheart (Cassadee Pope) who gradually becomes radicalized while attending the local college campus. From the moment he exchanges mementos with her before shipping off to basic training (items that we don’t actually see), you can guess where their story will go.
Justin Matthew Sargent is Johnny’s high school pal, the son of a lieutenant general who has a bit of a Southern accent and more than a bit of a rep as a ladies’ man. (He’s also the stand out vocalist of the ensemble, bringing a real rock-star quality to his solos with vocal fry and sustained belting.) The soulful singer Daniel Yearwood plays Andy, a draftee from parts unknown who receives warnings from another Black soldier, Mike (Deon’te Goodman), about the precarious state of racial integration in the units: “Take your rifle to the mess and to the latrine.” And the versatile Courtnee Carter shifts from a Houston-born nurse treating casualties on the front to Andy’s worried mother to a variety of protesters.
There’s a lack of specificity to these characters despite the research that the show’s concept designer Scott Barton and book writer Bryce Hallett did for the original production in their native Australia in 2014. That probably has a lot to do with the fact that most of these characters started out as Australian, based on interviews and letters Hallett collected from veterans there. As a result, the bulk of the authentic American experience of the Vietnam war seems to be restricted to audio clips and video projections of Walter Cronkite, Richard Nixon, Martin Luther King Jr., and others that are used as interstitial elements between numbers. (Projection design by Caite Hevner.)
Instead of digging deep on any one character’s experience, we get a diffuse account of a handful of people who never seem to come alive as actual people. (Andy’s older Army buddy Mike suddenly disappears in Act 1 — “Mike’s been hit, but he’ll be okay,” we’re told in passing — and then Goodman turns up moments later as an antiwar protester named Jimi who befriends Linda at college.) You get the sense that the team workshopped a checklist of key Vietnam War themes that needed to be addressed and then dutifully worked some mention of them into the text. We get passing references to cannabis, Agent Orange, and the brothels of Saigon (cue Santana’s “Black Magic Woman”). But we never linger very long on any one thread of the story, particularly the darker, more tragic ones about atrocities committed on the battlefield.
Under Kenneth Ferrone’s haphazard direction, there’s also a glaring disconnect between the cliché-heavy, awkwardly acted book scenes and the often sensational musical numbers — where the performers suddenly whip out unnecessary stage mics and sell the song in question with wide smiles accentuating period pastiche movement and leap-on-the-speaker rock-star vamping. (No choreographer is credited.)
The routines have a concert feel to them, enhanced by Andrea Lauer’s striking lighting design, and they convey a feel for the era and its incongruities that the scripted material does not. Plus, it’s hard to compete with lyricists like Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, and Paul Simon (whose “Bridge Over Troubled Water” ends the show on an elegiac note). Despite some impressive musical moments, Rolling Thunder feels as contadictory and unresolved as the Vietnam era itself. ★★☆☆☆
ROLLING THUNDER
New World Stages, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours (with 1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through September 7 for $48 to $149
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