[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts theatre review of Showstopper, a one-man musical starring Gary Stockdale at the Whitefire Theatre running March 21-April 25.
Music and theatre are symbiotic. Sometimes blissfully so. Sometimes not so much. But, Showstopper is utterly sublime and musically blissful. It’s an examination of the life of a well-known composer of musicals, the fictional Jerry Rockwell, brainchild of the composer Gary Stockdale who also performs as Jerry, Spencer Green and Matthew Leavitt. Between the three of them, they are responsible for a multitude of successful musicals, theatre and even the occasional opera!
What could these three master storytellers possibly cook up, with the use of a fictional character that they could not do justice to as themselves? Well, Showstopper, although it is far from parody, does explore the more brutal fringes of writing music as a job. The failures, the flops, the excruciating process of ideas and music and lyrics. The endless rejections, the highs and lows of fame and fortune.
All this is done through a parade of wonderful songs, all taken from Jerry’s own remarkable canon of work. Songs that are full of the wisdom and whimsy and absolutely hilarious anecdotes. Songs that run the gamut of style and sensibility.
From rock opera to a little light music. From brassy show tunes to introspective melodic acoustic cries in the dark. This Jerry Rockwell sure knows how to write…from every era, in every genre, and to every audience he can imagine.
Is he the star of this show? Perhaps. He’s certainly hard to ignore, alone on stage with his keyboard vibrating wildly as he pounds it and his guitar sitting dutifully in its stand. But I spent a good part of the time sitting in the audience wondering about the three writers who created this truly entertaining and thought-provoking show. Why this format? Why this character? Why a solo show and not a more drama-driven play? And also, how were they able to make this one show feel as if it were about all three of them? For that is what Showstopper is for me at least. A play with music about the disparate dimensions of the talent of three men performed by one.
Showstopper is a really wonderful way of exploring the human side of being an artist.
What on earth possesses someone to follow this path? The profound instability of the life. The rawness of it. Always searching for the perfection that a few moments of joy on stage can bring…and rarely finding it. I really felt that in this excellent show. The fragility of the artist, even as he belts out the song, his hands flitting flawlessly across the keys. Leaping from song to song with the ease of a high wire trapezist, with just as much nerve needed and only a little less chance of disaster and death.
Showstopper is a show about how to survive being a showman. But it is also about how to survive as a human being.
We are all just trying to make it from one day to the next, one song to the next, one life to the next without humiliation and failure and hoping for love and admiration. Jerry Rockwell is all of us…put to song, and in this way, all of us can identify with every moment he is on stage. The self torture, the depreciation, lack of confidence and a life full of self doubt. But these are ofter the marks borne by artists. It is the search for something more that drives them to create and fills their every waking hour. Ultimately, Jerry Rockwell writes for himself. Which is why his audience is never satisfied and why his work is ultimately so incredibly good.
Gary Stockdale performs as Jerry Rockwell, and he is astonishingly and often brutally authentic. Superb in fact. I absolutely loved this unique and heartrending play about an artist just being an artist. Beautiful, funny, real and highly entertaining! Bravo, Gary Stockdale, Spencer Green and Matthew Leavitt! Bravo!!!
Tickets:
https://showstopper.ludus.com/index.php
Where:
The Whitefire Theatre
13500 Ventura Blvd, Sherman Oaks, CA 91423
When:
March 21-April 25, Fridays at 8PM
The Team:
Gary Stockdale – Composer, Lyrics, Book, and Star of the Show.
Matthew Leavitt – Book, Director
Spencer Green – Book, Lyrics