Rock of Ages - Opera House, Manchester - Tuesday 14th March 2023

Is the Farewell Tour of this rock anthem filled musical overdue? Did this production ROCK my world and have me ROLLing down the aisles with excitement.... read on to find out!

Story

I'm going to start this review by saying do NOT go to see this show if you want a hard-hitting or complex story!

It was the most basic version of a boy meets girl love story, sprinkled with many... many.... MANY random other characters that had no depth or real reason to be part of the story, if truth be told. It didn't really flow well at all compared to other, more recent Jukebox musicals (& Juliet, I'm looking at you!) and it felt like the story was definitley second fiddle to the music.

It was very much a sharp cut between dialogue and music and songs have clearly been shoved in wherever they can with dialogue around them being forced into a song-shaped mold to make it fit.

The story of Rock of Ages is set in the mid to late 1980's, where views on women and sex were very different than they are today... but does that mean the female characters and performers and pretty much all the gags in the show need to be sexualised so much? Definitely not! It was too much! So much phsyical "comedy" being sexual, a lot of innuendos and also very direct jokes about penises and breasts was certainly not needed.

Another "gag" of the show was the German character, Franz, being overly camp and feminine with hints of being gay sprinkled throughout the show, to the point of him wearing a rainbow unitard during the song, "Hit Me With Your Best Shot". In 2023, do we still need someone's sexuality and personality to be the butt of the joke... the answer is very clearly NO!

There are other ways to be funny, other ways to deliver comedy and other ways to tell a great story!

Cast

I love to see a cover/understudy getting recognition around the theatre and shoutout to the production for having posters everywhere, letting us know who the covers were for tonight's performance!

The cast I saw is below and the covers were:

Darius James - Lonny

Reece Duncan - Stacee Jaxx

Rhys West - Onstage Swing

During tonight's performance there was a 30 minute delay for the show starting and a show stop during act 2 which you'd expect to bring the energy and atmosphere down massively. Well you'd be wrong! The cast did an amazing job at keeping everything pumping and keeping the audience engaged!

They're all powerhouses, to put it briefly. Amazing, rock-filled voices with belt to die for but soft tones and emotion to make anyone shed a tear... but with the story of the show... I did not shed a tear!

The leading cast worked really well together and you can see the trust and faith they have in eachother when in the big ensemble numbers. However, I did feel some of the dialogue heavy scenes where emotions were running high felt like they were all at the a volume level of 10. It felt like they were just shouting at eachother. Emotion doesn't always mean shouting.

While talking about the ensemble, it felt like the energy level wasn't the same across the board. Some of them were putting in 200% which looked over-the-top compared to the others were still grafting putting in 100%. As an ensemble, you expect them to work together and deliver a consistent performance across the board but this wasn't the case and at some points these red-bull filled cast members caught my eye when maybe they shouldn't have done.

Music/Sound/Set

If you want a lesson in how to mix sound well so you can appreciate the music but fall in love with the hard work the cast are putting in with the vocals... this wasn't it!

The music was SO, SO loud and was overbearing at times, to the point where we couldn't hear what the cast were singing or saying.

The microphones also didn't make the cast sound any clearer and this is one of the reasons for the show stop. Poor Franz's mic cut out just before his big song! When they were working they sounded muffled and we could hear a lot of breathing/movement which is very distracting.

I've put set under this heading too as there's not much to say... there was a bar on one side and a few fly in pieces but there was a lot left to the imagination.

Overall

Overall, I went in with low expectations as I usually do with a show that I can see is not booking very well and I've not seen before as then if it's amazing, I'd be pleasantly surprised and if not, I'm not disappointed.

This one was the latter.

I'm not taking anything away from the cast at all! They were amazing. It seems the producers kept things a bit too simple when it came to the set, the sound wasn't at the level it should be for a professional production and the writers of the show wrote a flop of a story.

I wouldn't see this show again, but I'd 100% see a show that any of this cast were in again!

Story ⭐

Cast ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Set ⭐⭐ Music ⭐

Overall ⭐⭐