Sarah Pidgeon, Juliana Canfield, and Tom Pecinka in Stereophonic. Photo: Chelcie Parry

Why can’t we let go of the rock era of the 1970s? Your average classic rock radio plays the same songs now that were hits when I was a kid. The Rolling Stones are still filling stadiums. Almost Famous came to Broadway just last year (admittedly with middling success); Daisy Jones and the Six hit Amazon Prime this spring. And how many farewell tours has The Who done now? So what’s the hook: Is it the tales of debauchery, of the free love and free-flowing cocaine that started to seem all too irresponsible in the AIDS era? Is it the sight of a giant mixing board, reel to reel tapes, and artists coming together in the studio, instead of sitting alone in their bedrooms with AutoTune and Garage Band? Is it the appeal to a shared popular culture, instead of the endless fragmentation of the playlist era? I’m not sure that David Adjmi’s Stereophonic answers any of those questions, or even tries to, but the play stakes its ground squarely in that legacy and that cultural moment. Specifically, Stereophonic replays the famously epic recording process of one of that era’s most storied records: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, which took a year, a lot of cocaine, and multiple breakups and makeups to get done. 

Adjmi may not ever name Fleetwood Mac, but the details of the band and the process overlap with a great deal of precision: A British trio were the band’s founders—drummer/manager Simon (Chris Stack) and the married couple of keyboardist/vocalist/songwriter Holly (Juliana Canfield) and alcoholic bass player Reggie (Will Brill). An American couple joins the band later, with a tumultuous, caustic relationship of their own—Peter (Tom Pecinka), lead guitarist, songwriter, and self-appointed producer, and singer-songwriter Diana (Sarah Pidgeon). A recording process in Sausalito sees the breakups of both couples and the two women moving into neighboring condos. Even some of the specific details of character biography (like Peter’s Olympic-swimmer brother, though he swims in a different Olympics than Lindsey Buckingham’s) or stories of how individual songs come together–spoiler alert–map directly onto the Fleetwood Mac story, down to a squabble over the ornamentation on a bass line and the engineering manipulations that result in the final guitar track. 

And by the end–also true to the source material–we reach a pitch of hostility that means the band can barely stand to be in a room together. When the tape is rolling, they’ll sing in perfect harmony but the minute the engineers–the striving Grover (Eli Gelb), who lied on his resume to get this gig, and his hapless sidekick Charlie (Andrew R. Butler)–hit pause, they’re sniping at each other again.

It’s slightly unfortunate timing that Stereophonic so closely follows Daisy Jones and the Six, adapted from Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel and likewise inspired by the Fleetwood Mac saga, which has Amazon money to burn on production design. Still, the production team here luxuriates in the 1970s aesthetic, down to a vintage popup shop in the mezzanine lobby. Costume designer Enver Chakartash’s work is particularly essential; because the entire play takes place in the hermetically sealed, windowless studio where no one seems to go home at night, the costume changes are essential to give us the sense of time passing. Kudos go also to hair and wig designer Tommy Kurzman–the men in particular have some iconic heads of hair–and to the gearheads’ attention that set designer David Zinn and props designer Matt Carlin give to the vintage instruments and console. (Not that I would know an anachronistic reel-to-reel at twenty paces, but my date sure would.)  

Where the show breaks with its source material most directly is, of course, the songs, which are original and by Will Butler (formerly of the indie band Arcade Fire), played as well as sung here by the cast. They’re catchy, not surprisingly, and watching them come together over the course of three hours is the chief joy of the play. You can imagine them being hits in the 1970s but truly, if I saw that band on stage at Brooklyn Steel tomorrow, I wouldn’t think them a nostalgia act. (Which says more about the state of rock music than it does about Butler or the songs, to be sure.)  

But outside of original songs, it’s not always clear what Stereophonic brings to the table that we don’t already know, other than setting up the engineers as characters alongside the rock stars–an internal audience for the band’s creative heights and interpersonal lows, and a framing device of sorts for the audience. But the character development overall doesn’t go that far beyond the public information available about Fleetwood Mac, and the studio setting means that work-adjacent small talk has to do a lot of heavy lifting as far as emotional nuance goes. We see these people in the moments in which they’ve come together to record; the fact that they’re breaking down (Reg) and breaking up (everyone) at the same time is almost beside the point. For the first few scenes, the play withholds actually seeing the band play, cutting right past the takes to the moments after, and you think it’s maybe going to be a character piece, withholding the music to let us focus on the people–but in fact, the opposite is generally true. The play is at its most engaging when it lets us linger in process rather than the somewhat predictable human interactions: Holly leaves Reg when his addictions get out of hand then takes him back then leaves again. Reg mostly cleans up his act (offstage). Peter wants to have a baby with Diana but she doesn’t. 

This production is blessed with Daniel Aukin as a director; with a single location and a three-plus-hour run time, there’s no moments of boredom or lost focus, and no dips in energy. And Aukin never succumbs to the temptation to let any of the characters linger in their emotional highs or lows, the frequent moments of tension or the rarer moments of affection, or to pick a character out of the ensemble to highlight as either Adjmi’s mouthpiece or his own. He recognizes that the narrative engine here is not really these people, but their process. The beginning, middle, and end of the story are the months it takes to record the album; wherever the people may be at the end of it, the real work has gotten done. And the fact that we’re often kept at one remove from that process, which takes place behind the pane of glass between us and the booth, with Grover the engineer as our mediator, makes us listen all the harder. (Many of the significant character beats take place offstage anyway—we eavesdrop on one breakup through a mike that Grover sneakily leaves on, and another through his retelling of seeing it happen outside.) 

The ensemble is solid in both musicianship and acting, but by the end I was a little sick of all of them–their self-absorption, their indifference to one another’s needs, and in the case of Peter and Reg in particular, some peaks of assholery that make you wish Diana and Holly would both just walk out the door. (Though Will Brill brings an endearing sincerity to Reg that somehow makes his bad behavior worse; you feel he could do better, but he won’t pull it together enough to try.) Canfield and Brill have a sweetness together that sometimes makes you wish they’d made it work, though the portrait of addiction is stark enough that you see why they didn’t. Pecinka and Pidgeon, on the other hand, make Peter and Diana’s relationship a combustible mix of her narcissistic insecurities and his narcissistic nastiness. I didn’t want to be in a room with either of them any more than Holly did, by the end. 

But while the play breathes, settles, lives most in the studio, there’s not that much process to it, either. We see the work on individual songs, but I wish it leaned even more in that direction; I wish we felt the arc of the album coming together, of the energy of the thing that they’re making in ways that don’t mostly take the form of brief conversations between Peter and the engineers. For me, the most effective scene comes late at night, when at the end of a recording session, Peter comes up with a new idea for their song “Bright.” It’s take 22, everyone is beat, but he suddenly hears it a whole new way in his mind; he gets everyone on board, makes it happen. We hear the song change, we feel that moment of genius, we feel them feel it. And then Peter can’t resist cutting down Diana, who wrote the song: “There’s only so much I can do if you’re not gonna cut the verses down; your ego is getting in the way.” Everything about their relationship, about his character, is in that conjunction, in the interplay between their art and their life. Those moments in Stereophonic felt far too few.