Buddy’s back

The Mercury Theater’s production of ‘The Buddy Holly Story’ accurately captures the singer’s rapid rise to stardom

By Jeremy Schnitker

Whether or not you like a musical has a lot to do with whether or not you like the music that inspired the musical.

If you attend a musical about Abba, for example, and you despise Swedish disco pop, then no matter how great the production and acting are, you’ll likely find it painful to sit through an Abba musical.

If you’re like me and you can listen to Buddy Holly at any time during any day, odds are, you’ll thoroughly enjoy a musical made of his music. That said, you could be someone who only marginally appreciates the 1950s pop icon’s ditties and still thoroughly enjoy the Mercury Theater’s production of “The Buddy Holly Story.”

The music, the acting and the overall production are enough to capture and maintain the attention of just about anybody who appreciates good music.

The other key to a good musical inspired by music we’ve likely heard many times is how well it’s rendered, and as a Holly enthusiast, I can say I was impressed with leading man Josh Solomon’s portrayal.

He captures the bumpkin geeky approach of Holly’s personality and has the guitar chops and vocal range to allow you to momentarily forget that you weren’t seeing the real deal. (He’s no Gary Busey, but hey, who is?)

For the first half of the show, you get a lot of the back story about how difficult it was for him and his band, the Crickets, to convince their original producers that their progressive rock ‘n’ roll, or “black” sound, had a market (history obviously took their side.) They are eventually introduced to innovative producer Norman Petty (played by a superbly subtle Scott McKay), and quickly thereafter, Holly becomes a chart-topper.

In the second half, you get the feeling director Janet Louer is trying to squeeze in as much of Holly’s massive hit catalog as possible (which you realize is amazingly prodigious, considering he died at 22). This isn’t a bad thing, because you obviously want to hear them all, and you are also introduced to some new characters, the most pleasant of whom were the Apollo singers.

One of the most interesting storylines surrounding Holly, and one that reinforced his status as one of the first artists to cross black and white boundaries, were his performances at the exclusively black Apollo Theater in Harlem. Booked by mistake, because many folks actually thought they were a black act, Holly and the Crickets took the stage for a series of shows and were initially met with boos. However, after a couple nights, they eventually won the crowd over.

Dawn Bless, who spearheaded the Apollo singer threesome, is deserving of an entire musical to herself, as she outsang the entire cast.

Then, we are brought to that fateful last performance at the Surf Ballroom the night before Holly, J.P. Richardson (“The Big Bopper”) and Ritchie Valens tragically died in a plane crash. Which also brought on perhaps the most overdone segment of the night, the rambling rendition of the Bopper’s only hit, “Chantilly Lace.”

Everybody knows the Bopper was the least talented guy on that plane, and I thought putting in what seemed like a 10-minute version of that song was a bit much. The obvious reason the director chose to drag that segment out was because James Turano did such a bang-up job channeling the Bopper’s machismo swagger.

And that sort of brings me back to the whole musical appreciating conundrum: If you don’t like the music, you probably won’t like the musical, no matter how well it’s done. Thankfully for Holly’s legacy, his tunes are so damn good and universally appreciated, that musicals inspired by them can be enjoyed by just about anybody, and this production is no exception.

For ticket information to The Buddy Holly Story, call the Mercury Theater (3745 N. Southport) at (773) 325-1700 or log on to www.Ticketmaster.com.

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