Rock of Ages

Remember when you went to see your favourite band playing live, and it was great, but somehow it wasn’t as good as expected?

They played all the right songs and made all the right moves, but you still left feeling that it should have been more exciting.

That’s how I felt with Rock of Ages, a musical stringing together powerful rock era anthems, colourful characters, a meaty plot and an excellent stage set.

The musical has been a hit around the world, billed as bold, lewd and hilarious flamboyant fun. It’s the story of Sherrie (Jessica Driver) a wanna-be actress and Drew (Josh Ansley,) a wanna-be rock star who meet at the Bourbon Room in Hollywood in the 1980s. The bar is under threat of redevelopment by a pair of German goose-stepping, Nazi-saluting property developers, who have bribed the mayor to accept their planning proposals with a suitcase full of loot.

The bar owner decides to go out on a high with a final performance by Stacee Jaxx, a reprobate rock star who seduces Sherrie then gets her fired.

The action is accompanied by well-chosen rock songs sung by the cast and played by a five-piece band at the back of the stage. The band led by conductor Wessel Odendaal on keyboards belts out numbers by Bon Jovi, Journey, Foreigner and Pat Benatar, and in an ideal atmosphere, the audience would be singing along too.

Cito, the lead singer of the real band WonderBOOM, is excellent as the big shot star, strutting around having a great time as the bare-chested rocker with an entourage of eager groupies.

Craig Urbani is also fabulous as the Bourbon Room’s owner, almost unrecognisable in his tasselled cowboy jacket and long hippy hair and putting his great voice to excellent use.

A lot of the work falls to Zak Hendrikz as Lonny, the hired help at the bar, and he’s great fun, with a cocky confidence as he narrates us through the story.

The glorious stage set by Nadine Minaar has some great details and various areas where the action can take place in several locations simultaneously.

It all sounds like a blast! And it sort of is, except the sum of the excellent parts didn’t quite gel into the mesmerising whole it ought to be, and by the interval the mood was disappointingly flat. I found I didn’t care enough about the other characters to be concerned about their emotional highs and lows.

Perhaps it’s a little too bitty, with an overabundance of music to spoken word ratio.

There are some funny scenes and a few raunchy moves, although a friend who saw the show a couple of years ago says the salacious moves, innuendoes and blatant sexiness seem to have been toned down, to ill effect.

Things certainly picked up in the stronger second half when the glitter and energy spilled out from the stage more effectively.

The story written by Chris D’Arienzo has lots of saucy lines and plot direction and but those do seem to be played down by the cast under the direction of Timothy Le Roux. Maybe they’ve decided to try and appeal to families to fill Montecasino’s big Teatro auditorium, but this is never going to be wholesome child-friendly fare, so it really needs to lustily embrace and play up the naughtiness.

Rock of Ages runs at Montecasino’s Teatro until October 20. Tickets from Computicket.

Photos: Christiaan Kotze