‘The Team Wanted It to Be the Next Mamma Mia!’

When the script for The Heart of Rock and Roll first came across Corey Cott’s desk, the actor was skeptical that the ’80s-set jukebox musical, powered by the songbook of Huey Lewis, was a rousing enough idea to get him to return to Broadway. “I was like, Ah, not another one of these. I’m a testament to someone in our business who rolls their eyes and goes, ‘Why can’t they come up with an original idea?’” he admits. “But it wooed me.” Not because of nonconformity, experimental staging, or even a “Hey, Paul!” third-act twist. “I was simply won over because I had so much fun reading the script,” he says. “I sat down, I played each song, and I was like, Oh, there’s something here. This isn’t just another uninspired show.”

Unfortunately, theatergoers and awards voters didn’t share Cott’s sentiment, even if critics did. The Heart of Rock and Roll was one of the first casualties of this theater season, with its final show occurring on Sunday, June 23, after 72 performances. Cott portrayed Bobby, the musical’s protagonist, as he debates brain versus heart at a weekend business conference: Should he continue working at a Midwestern cardboard-box company or keep trying to pursue his rock-star dreams? (In our positive review, we branded it as “the funniest new musical of the season.”) Barely half of the theater was full by the end of its run, and the Tony Awards snubbed it in all qualifying categories. Cott has a theory for the latter. “In general, the Tonys are reluctant to award fun,” he says. “There’s this reluctance to honor shows that are just fun for the sake of popcorn-eating fun. I go down this dumb rabbit hole of wasting my time thinking more about it, and then I’m like, Oh, that’s not why we do this. We just do this because we love it. You just never know what’s going to happen.”

Despite its brief Broadway run, Cott is optimistic that The Heart of Rock and Roll could live on and jump across the pond to the West End; should that happen, he would love to reprise his role. “At the end of the day, you have to trust your instincts, trust the gift of a job in front of you, and do the best you can and hope for the best,” he says. “It’s a wild business, but I’m so thankful to be a part of it.”

What was it about Huey’s songs that were uniquely suited to give a musical its soul?
We tend to put these people we celebrate as “celebrities” or “famous people” on pedestals and assume that they’re different or heightened. We project these things onto them that eliminate their humanity. What’s compelling about Huey is how wonderfully honest, humble, and accessible he is. You can see that in The Greatest Night in Pop. He’s able to take all of those traits and put it into his music. What’s fun is it’s easy to activate that. A jukebox musical is tough — you have to find a way to make these songs active, put them inside of a given circumstance with a story, and make these characters want something. A lot of Huey’s songs already have that because he writes from a place of need. You could argue it’s simple, poppy, and doo-woppy, but it still means something.

When you went into this show, what were you predicting in terms of its longevity? Is there generally an added level of safety when it comes to being cast in jukebox musicals, given that the audience has familiarity with the music?
The most truthful answer is I just didn’t know. I’ve been offered roles in the past that I passed on because of the risk of it lasting was slim or its success didn’t seem viable to me. The way The Heart of Rock and Roll was pitched to me was the team wanted it to be the next Mamma Mia!, which surpassed everyone’s expectations for how much of a global phenomenon it became. While I’m a realist and pretty perceptive, I could see it. I also saw it when I started telling people I was considering the show. The reactions I got around me, especially from the older generation, were very overwhelming and positive. That made me go, Oh man, maybe this thing has legs.

I thought the story was really witty and sweet. It takes place at a conference, and there’s this line near the end that goes, “Never underestimate the pheromonal energy of a three-day business conference.” This accomplishes a lot of things. One, it shows the audience — and we do this a lot in the show — that we’re aware of how fun, silly, and almost campy we can be. The show is aware of itself, and that allows the audience to not take it as seriously as other shows. Secondly, I feel like that’s a very real scenario. We’ve had people at the stage door who work nine-to-five corporate jobs say, “This is exactly right.” It’s all the absurd things that happen at a business conference when you’re away: People are partying, crazy connections are happening, and you’re meeting someone you didn’t expect. So it’s this synergy of a crazy, almost out-of-reality story paired with something that’s very normal and real, too. So all of that together with the music was worth the risk of doing the show. We all just hoped for a longer run.

How did you think the show was situated in the current Broadway landscape?
You could probably write a novel about this theater season with how many new shows were involved. This sounds like such a cliché answer, but the landscape of Broadway is changing in so many ways economically. It was very tough before COVID, but now with the rising cost of how everything works — the cost of unions, the cost of wages and materials — it’s just expensive to do a Broadway show. It’s incredibly hard to recoup your money on Broadway, regardless of a season of packed musicals and competition. So there’s that alone — just the cost of everything.

And then you have 40 shows to choose from. Ticket prices have to be high in order to bring a return back to an investor. People can’t see as many shows right now. There’s a reckoning that’s going to come at some point with these audiences, because they can’t afford to see more than one or two shows. If I’m coming in and I have a family of four, and I’m paying $150 per ticket, that’s a significant amount of money. So to see more than one show, it’s like, “Well, let’s pick the best one we can see.” That’s obviously subjective, and it’s going to change depending on who you are and what you’re interested in.

What we felt was our advantage was we believed our audience was pretty broad. We were one of the only true musical comedies of this season. There were a lot of serious shows this year. There’s a spectrum of material and stories that need to be told and issues that need to be dealt with from a storytelling perspective, but we offered the most fun of this season on Broadway. I still believe that.

So yeah, where are we situated? It’s tough to know. We’ll probably have to do a retrospective at some point and assess that as we move through the year. We did the best we could. Our cast is the most stellar cast, and I don’t regret a single thing about what we did. I wouldn’t change anything.

Have you found that jukebox-musical audiences are changing? The Neil Diamond musical is now closing after a year, and even Escape to Margaritaville barely survived a season with the Parrotheads backing it in 2018. The Cher Show didn’t last too long in 2019, either. Is there a generational shift occurring?
If we zoom out a little bit, there are very few completely original shows this season. Few besides Lempicka weren’t based on existing IP. When you think of jukebox musicals, everyone has a different idea of what that means. Somehow, & Juliet has escaped that. With a jukebox musical, I think of a canon of existing music that’s used to create a musical — not necessarily from a particular artist, but music that already exists in a different medium that’s now being used to fabricate and retool to tell a story. & Juliet is an interesting case, because I don’t think that just because something is a jukebox musical means it’s inherently bad, or inherently doesn’t have a life, or inherently is less than something that’s original, because there’s a true art to it. Jersey Boys is one of the most celebrated musicals of all time, and it’s because the story of those four guys was compelling and excited the hell out of people. I don’t think you can say one thing or the other about whether there’s a certain objective reality for how jukebox musicals exist in the current landscape of Broadway. It comes down to what the story is and the variables surrounding it.

Maybe in a different year, our show could be the hit of the season. I do think a huge thing was getting swallowed in the season. Everyone from every part of the industry could look at our show and go, Oh, well, it didn’t live up to these standards. I don’t think our show should be an assessment of how jukebox musicals should or shouldn’t be going forward, because I do think that it comes down to the story, the structure, and what the message is behind it.

I’m curious to see how it works going forward. I would bet that existing IP gives you a leg up in general. Look at MJ: The Musical. It’s maybe the best thing I’ve seen in a decade. I’m obsessed with that show. And for some reason it doesn’t get thrown around as a “jukebox musical” as much as our show, or Escape to Margaritaville, or A Beautiful Noise. I don’t know if it’s a conceptual thing or a marketing thing. It’s just tricky.

What parts of the show did you find really connected with that audience every night?
The most consistent laughs are the HR jokes. There’s a scene where we’re all having this business meeting in the sauna with our clothes off, and Roz, the human-resources manager character, comes in and says, “Well, if you’re having a meeting without your clothes on, then HR better be present.” She also has a line later on that goes, “I quit my dream of being in a band so I could pursue the unbridled joy of human resources.” It’s funny, because human resources exists in the theater world, but not in the same way it does in the corporate world. The entity and the institution of HR is a much more broad thing to an audience, so when that hits, it always gets a big response.

A lot of people have told me that they’ve been moved by the show, too. The show is about pursuing your dreams, which is such a cliché, big thing in every Broadway show, but people relate to that idea of, I have this thing inside of me that I have to go after. I get to sing this really cool song in the second act called “The Only One” about my character losing his dad. It’s one of the only serious moments in the show. It comes at a much-needed moment, because we have these absurd comedy beats, one-liners, and crazy dance numbers, and all of a sudden it sits in the reality of what my character’s internal struggle is. A lot of people have said that it hits them out of nowhere, and they really appreciated that. But the music is what, ultimately, people love to hear.

When I chatted with Huey earlier this month, before the closure announcement, he expressed disappointment at the lack of Tonys and posited, “Maybe it’s me.” That is, of course, logic I won’t accept. But he couldn’t figure it out. So I want to pose the same question to you: What did voters not appreciate or understand about the show?
I’ve now opened three original shows, and all three of them opened the same week in the season — the second or third week of April. I think one variable is that we opened at a time where the Tony nominating committee, which consists of around 40 people, were required to come in to see every show and submit their thoughts. There’s just too much theater.

But if you look at shows like Hamilton and Merrily We Roll Along and Moulin Rouge!, they all opened in the summer before, just as the season was starting. That strategy is risky but brilliant, because you set the bar for the season, and it’s really hard for people to escape the psychological decision that people have made in being that “standard.” It’s the snowball effect. I’m convinced a big part of it is the psychology of how a season is built and timing. Listen, I’ll be nervous about opening a show during that time in the future. You could blame the shows, you could blame a lot of things, but that’s a pattern I’ve seen that hasn’t been successful for the shows I’ve done from a timing perspective.

I think being a musical comedy in a season of dramas can be a tool or an advantage from an audience perspective. But from an awards perspective, comedies historically don’t compete as well with them. They’re just not taken as seriously. A “highbrow comedy,” like One Man, Two Guvnors, is a different thing. Pure comedy is just overlooked. The nature of awards, not just the Tonys, seem to acknowledge things that have a level of sophistication, which our show doesn’t contain as much as others. Our show is about a bunch of working-class people trying to figure themselves out at a business conference in Chicago. It doesn’t deal with very taboo things. It’s broad and accessible. It’s not trying to revolutionize anything. That’s one thing the show was aware of and was trying to be comfortable with — we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here. We’re not trying to speak about themes that are taboo in our society right now. We’re very middle of the road. That can be a recipe for being overlooked. It’s a shame. I’ll go to the grave saying our show is as good as every other show this season. But what are you going to do?

Did the complete Tonys shutout surprise you?
The team might hate me for saying this, but no, I wasn’t surprised at all. For me, the hope and the win of this show was appealing to the people who don’t watch the Tonys — the people who want to come to New York, see a fun show, and escape reality for two and a half hours. Those aren’t things that go together for awards success. I sit in a duality of trying to be perceptive about what our business does and doing my job the best that I can with whatever’s given to me.

What I was surprised at and so moved by was how well received we were by the press. We ended up becoming one of the most positively reviewed shows of the season, and that was such a breath of fresh air for us and motivated us. It’s not a matter of doing this only for the reviews — we’re doing this to win over audiences and sell tickets — but that was a really cool surprise that I didn’t expect. That was almost as good as getting nominated for Tonys. You have to take everything in stride. To have received a little bit of glory with the press was really cool.

Do you envision the show enjoying a second life on a nationwide tour or on the West End?
Our producers will tell you that they expect us to have a very strong afterlife. There are plans for many different productions in a tour, hopefully in other countries. I hope it’s licensed a lot, because it’s a very middle-of-the-road show, so I expect it to be done everywhere. I hope high schools and regional theaters are doing it. I would love to do it on the West End, too, if the team would have me. I’ve never worked in the West End, and if it worked out with schedules and life to do it over there, it would be a blast. Let’s get that West End train rolling. That would be awesome.