All Shook Up: Grooving on the Elvis Presley Jukebox

Ryan Mac and the company of All Shook Up. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

The current production of All Shook Up, Joe DiPietro’s parodic jukebox musical, at the Goodspeed Opera House is a homecoming of sorts, since the original version, directed by Christopher Ashley, began there in 2004 before opening on Broadway the following year. It never really caught on in New York; it ran for five months and then toured the country in 2006 and 2007. Seeing the show for the first time in its revival at the Goodspeed, I honestly can’t imagine why it wasn’t a hit from the outset. I can’t say, of course, what the current director and choreographer, Daniel Goldstein and Byron Easley, have brought to the show, but the material is charming and the production is inspiriting. The twenty-five songs were all recorded by Elvis Presley (I recognized most but not quite all of them). The musical revamps the low-budget rock ‘n’ roll movie musicals of the fifties like Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock starring Alan Freed, the DJ credited with popularizing rock. (Freed is also the main character of the vivid 1978 film American Hot Wax, where he’s played, memorably, by Tim McIntire.)

All Shook Up replays those musicals, in which Freed fights the good fight against repressed communities that try to ban rock ‘n’ roll, but DiPietro has his tongue firmly in his cheek. And he’s smart enough to draw on Shakespeare’s cross-dressing romantic comedies, especially Twelfth Night. The heroine, a feisty, lovelorn teenager named Natalie Haller, disguises herself as a male auto mechanic named Ed in a desperate effort to get closer to Chad, the roustabout who liberates the rock ‘n’ roll soul of a small Midwestern town where the mayor has outlawed rock music and anything else she can think of that might permit the kids to express their individuality. Chad stands in for Presley, of course, the spirit of teen rebellion against the corseted Eisenhower fifties whose hips couldn’t be shown on camera when he first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956. But he’s much more fun than Presley was in his movies, which were pretty lame. (One of them is called Roustabout.) And All Shook Up is more fun than Your Own Thing, the rock musical version of Twelfth Night that had a successful off-Broadway run in the late sixties and early seventies.

DiPietro filled out his cast of characters with crowd-pleasing musical-comedy types, and the stage of the Goodspeed is populated by winners. As well as Ryan Mac as the endearing, upbeat motorcycle cowboy Chad, who is thrown into comic confusion when he thinks he’s fallen for another dude (a trope DiPietro may have lifted from Your Own Thing), and sweet-voiced Kerstin Anderson as Natalie, there are Jordan Matthew Brown as her nerdy best pal Dennis, who has been in love with her all his life but can’t figure out how to tell her; and Jackera Davis as her closest female friend, Lorraine, whose mother, Sylvia, runs the local bar, and who finds her soulmate in Dean (Jackson Reagin), the son of the tyrant mayor, Matilda (Amy Hillner Larsen). L Morgan Lee is listed in the program as Sylvia, but at the press opening the role was taken by Montria Walker, whose sizzling R&B contralto brought down the house every time she came in on a number. (She’s heard in four of them.) The book matches her up with Natalie’s dad, Jim (Benjamin Howes), a widower who owns the garage where she works. But first he and Chad both have to get over their crushes on Miss Sandra (Jessica Crouch), who directs the local museum. Miss Sandra is a take on the pretentious intellectual who’s turned on behind her specs (like Claire de Loone in On the Town) – and who, in this case, is also a dish.

Jackson Reagin and Jackera Davis. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

The mayor’s ideas about clamping down on her town are also racially tinged. Her shock when her military-school son goes for Lorraine is mostly a response to the fact that she’s Black – DiPietro, mining the African American roots of Presley’s music, was obviously thinking of Hairspray, which had been Broadway’s biggest musical two seasons earlier. Mayor Matilda is a thankless part up until the end, when the show redeems her by giving her a mate, Sheriff Earl (Kilty Reidy).

I wouldn’t like to have to choose a standout performer in this crew – at different moments Walker, Anderson, Brown, Howes, Crouch and (together) Davis and Reagin steal the show. I enjoyed Mac a great deal; my only reservation is that he’s the only one who never gets beneath his jokey façade – delightful and funny as it is – and manages to win through to some kind of sincerity. The singing and dancing are absolutely up to Goodspeed’s old standard (Adam J. Rineer and Adam Souza, respectively, directed and supervised the music); the chorus adds muscle and personality to the ensemble. Both the set designer, Beowulf Boritt, and the costume designer, Tilly Grimes, save their cleverest tricks for the final scene. This summertime musical is a vacation all by itself.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.