Schedule	Buy Tickets
Ongoing	Every Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Wed, Sat, 2pm; Sun, 3pm

Profile

You remember “Walking in Memphis,” Marc Cohn’s catchy bit of Delta-tourism pop from the early nineties? Remember how you kinda dug it despite—or perhaps because of—its brochurelike approach to the cradle of American music? (Beale Street: Check! “Catfish on the table”: Check! Gospel choir: Check!) Well, Memphis: The Musical is like that, too, only without any songs nearly as catchy. High-mindedly but softheadedly penned by librettist-lyricist Joe DiPietro (I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change) and composer and Bon Jovist David Bryan (he plays keyboards with the band, and also co-wrote The Toxic Avenger: The Musical with Di-Pietro), Memphis may be the first musical about pop music to be based on other musicals about pop music, with strong whiffs of Bye Bye Birdie, Dreamgirls, and Hairspray.

Memphis is a mock-up of a phony, but it does intend to convey a serious message: Rock and roll, it seems, was not invented by white people! Of course, this being Broadway, a white guy is still the star: Chad Kimball plays Huey Calhoun, a stand-in for real-life Memphis deejay Dewey Phillips, the motor-mouthed firebrand who was among the first to play R&B “race records” for white audiences and famously gave Elvis his radio debut. Unlike Dewey, Huey doesn’t put Elvis on the air—indeed, he seems to exist in an Elvis-less Memphis, where white people sing and dance about only one subject: the inability of white people to sing and dance.

But it’s just as well: No ersatz Broadway Elvis would fit onstage with Kimball. With his 78-r.p.m. delivery and quicksilver tenor, he’s a perfectly contoured stone skipped briskly across the show’s sluggish surface. He sells a passable eleven o’clock number, “Memphis Lives in Me,” as an aching, ringing heartland anthem. Ultimately, neither he, nor his brass-piped, Diana Ross–ish love interest Felicia (Montego Glover), nor the poppin’ ensemble, can save Memphis from melodic poverty, Bono-grade race-bathos, and lyrics like “We gotta change our intolerant ways.” But they do give an empty K-Tel collage of a show an honest soul. And, in Kimball, Memphis has given us a brand-new Broadway rock star. — Scott Brown