THEATER REVIEW | It's only Rock 'n' Roll, but Stoppard play at Goodman covers a lot of ground
Taken from the May 11, 2009 issue of the Chicago Tribune
By Chris Jones
To love rock music—any music, really—is to be forever drawing lines between pure art and sold-out pablum. You must have participated in such conversations. "You have to catch this incredible early recording from before the label, or the managers, or the thirst for fame and money got hold of [insert title of band here]," they typically go. "It was all commercialized crap after that."
Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, a 2006 drama that uses the impossibly brilliant frontman Syd Barrett's 1968 exit from the ambitious band Pink Floyd as one of those great lines of cultural demarcation, seems at first like an impossibly dense history play.
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Stoppard's Rock and Roll creates a soundtrack for 20th century European history
THEATER REVIEW | Ambitious work sets the tone for change
Taken from the May 12, 2009 issue of the Chicago Sun-Times
By Hedy Weiss
Ask for a concise description of what animates Tom Stoppard's play Rock 'n' Roll—now in a richly sensual, emotionally rousing, intellectually dense and challenging production at the Goodman Theatre—and the temptation is to answer "everything." But here's the distilled version: It is about all that changes, all that endures and all that prevails—whether in the grand scheme of 20th century European politics and history, or in the personal lives of characters who shuttle between two cities (Cambridge, England, and Prague, Czechoslovakia) as communism and democracy duke it out.
And, yes, the Pan-like ghost of Syd Barrett, a charismatic founding member of Pink Floyd whose sad decline seems emblematic of so much else, hovers over the play, just as the pulsating life force of the Rolling Stones keeps it rocking on.
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