Broadway shows now chock-full of pop tunes

NEVER HAS Broadway rocked and funked, popped and punked with as much star power and energy as it's sharing right now.

In a quarter-mile theater zone abutting Times Square in Manhattan you can be blasted with the feisty anthems of Green Day, spin the night fantastic with the Emperor of Romance Frank Sinatra, get down and dirty with Nigeria's King of Afrobeat Fela Kuti, and relive one platinum-weight night when rockabilly royalty Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis met to jam, joke and jostle.

Popular music has long enjoyed a tight relationship with Broadway. Once upon a time stage musicals were the place where hit songs were introduced and established, to then be spread far and wide via sheet music, radio and TV performances and disks - from "My Funny Valentine" to the age of "Aquarius."

In the latter decades of the 20th century, the high art ambitions of Broadway composers like Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber and simultaneous shifts of populist taste caused that connection to break. Only one Sondheim show tune, "Send in the Clowns," ever scored as an easy listening/adult pop hit.

Yet in recent years, Broadway producers and creators have made a more conscious effort to get with the program again, to poach the pop, turning to tunesmiths like Elton John ("The Lion King," "Billy Elliot") and Billy Joel ("Movin' Out") for show fodder, and pumping up enthusiasm for a genre labeled the "Jukebox Musical," which is really more of a glorified artist's career overview/revue.

You've gotta dig deep to find an original Broadway tune in the latest crop of pop musicals, which also include the highly successful "Jersey Boys" (the Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons saga) and goofy hair band celebration "Rock of Ages." One notable exception is the starless "Memphis," (auditioned in soundtrack form). It's a glance back at that town's potent R&B and rock music scene in the racially divisive 1950s, scored by Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan in serviceably generic fashion.

There's also a just-opened revival of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David-scored 1968 musical "Promises, Promises" based on the film "The Apartment," which produced pop hits back in the day with the title tune and "I'll Never Fall In Love Again."

But who needs "new" when tried and true comes presold?

Today's Broadway producers believe that familiarity doesn't build contempt, it earns instant respect and box office clout. Rock and pop are today's coins of the realm, not Rodgers and Hammerstein.

So shows that are about and essentially "star" the avatars and music of Frank, Elvis and Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong come with a predisposed and huge global fan base, are likely to appeal equally to visitors from Osaka, Japan, as well as Omaha, Neb. (No translation required!)

To their credit, the creative teams have invested big in these properties, with ambitious stagecraft that puts even the grandest concerts to shame and sometimes makes you forget you're not really hanging with the originals.

Based on a historic night in December 1956 when four of the biggest talents to record for Sun Records gathered in the studio and recorded an album's worth of material, "Million Dollar Quartet" is the most intimate of the new rock-on-Broadway shows, and closest to the "Jukebox" form. Just don't go in expecting too much, and it should pleasantly surprise you.

The (light) drama evolves around Sun Records proprietor Sam Phillips (genially played by Hunter Foster), who's semi-regretting that he signed away his star property Elvis Presley to RCA and pondering whether he should take up the label's offer to come work with Elvis in-house.

Adding complications, two of his other hot properties, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash, are itching to leave the stable. But not all is going badly. A spitfire singer/piano pounder named Jerry Lee Lewis has just walked in the door, ready to show any and all that he can't be beat. Given the best comic material and out-there rockin' persona, Levi Kreis' spot-on personification of Lewis pretty much steals the show. But he almost meets his match in ongoing parries, both verbal and musical, with Robert Britton Lyons as an angry young Perkins.

It clearly helps that these guys, along with Lance Guest's Johnny Cash and Eddie Clendening as Elvis, serve as the core of the stage band, fleshed out with just a drummer and bass player, and crank it up loudly for maximum rock and roll impact. They serve up a combination of hits ("I Walk the Line," "Whole Lotta Shaking Goin On," "Hound Dog," "Blue Suede Shoes") that this fab four probably didn't do that fateful night, and a bunch of country gospel harmony songs which they clearly did (there's an album to prove it).

The show's biggest fiction is the introduction of a Presley girlfriend, played by Elizabeth Stanley as a mix of Ann-Margret and Peggy Lee, who adds sex appeal (steaming through "Fever"), dramatically draws out Phillips, and also acts as mouthpiece for Presley. (Elvis did have a date that night, but she was a dancer, not a singer.)

And that's the biggest curio. While he's the elephant in the room, Presley comes off in "MDQ" as the least magnetic and verbal of the bunch. I'm thinking the creators decided it would be impossible for anyone to erase our images of the real Presley, so they didn't bother to try!

Nederlander Theatre, 208 W. 41st St. Discount tickets available Tuesday-Thursday, Sunday evenings and Friday-Sunday matinees at www.broadwaybox.com or 212-947-8844. Use code 10BOX.

For a terrific shock to the senses, verging on an out-of-body experience, it's hard to beat the celebration of "Fela!," a musical treat that's transformed the Eugene O'Neill Theater into a graffiti-strewn replica of a Lagos, Nigeria, nightclub/compound called The Shrine. Presiding over this mini kingdom (which he declared an independent state) is Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the charismatic, crusading, pot-stoked and just a tad crazy creator of a sound and lifestyle called Afrobeat that merged funk, jazz and polyrhythmic tribal music with sung/spoken tirades like "Zombie" and "Water Get No Enemy" - gems some consider the roots of protest rap.

Hugely popular throughout Africa and Europe from the 1970s forward, though not so much in the U.S., Fela's jam-on, super-festive stage shows featured many a dancing girl (drawn from his pool of 27 wives) in colorful African garb, furiously gyrating as the James Brown-influenced tunes stretched out as long as an hour. In Bill T. Jones' 360-degree, multimedia staging, the effect is achieved without wearing out our ears by changing up and regularly dropping the songs down low, so Fela (acted/sung and sax-tooted brilliantly by Kevin Mambo at the show I caught) can speak his mind, share his story, interact with his women and especially strong-willed mother, and take on the military police when they start beating down the doors. (This self-proclaimed "Black President" was arrested many times, the last shortly before his death in 1997.)

There's history and culture galore to garner here. And there's a visual/sonic groove that immediately grabbed the matinee crowd in my company, especially the contingents of school kids in the house.

Eugene O'Neill Theatre, 230 W. 49th St. Midweek and Sunday night show discounts available through May 16 at BroadwayOffers.com and 212-947-8844 with code FELTX24.

I adored Twyla Tharp's "Nine Sinatra Songs" when the Pennsylvania Ballet performed the half-hour dance suite a few years back. Each choreographed song (think "My Way," "One For My Baby," "That's Life") suggested individual characters, fleshed out with a story line, just as Tharp also did with her Billy Joel songbook adaptation "Movin' Out."

So how could the choreographer fail with a full-length homage to Sinatra, her musical romance "Come Fly Away," scored with a unique blend of Sinatra's prerecorded vocals and a big, brassy, live-on-stage band? Wouldn't it be at least four times better?

Uh, not quite. Only one of the four couples whose dogged pursuit of sex and romance in this dialogue-free, nightclub-set show achieve anything like a distinct identity. And that's the couple presented as hapless comic foils. The other sets of Sinatra-styled swingers may have different ethnic identities, but all suffer from the same modern romance syndrome (is it Sinatra's fault?) of "I love him/her/them, I love 'em not."

Yeah, there's always someone better on the other side of the room, ready to throw himself into your arms. And in Tharp's case, with her highly physical and precise choreography, that's shown literally. There's an unforgettable moment where a guy is taking off his jacket and a blink later catching a woman who is already soaring through the air toward him. It was an amazing feat, the first time. Problem was, these dance characters were throwing themselves and each other around, all night long.

Another thing that annoyed picky me was Tharp's (or maybe the Sinatra family's) decision to use mostly studio recordings of The Man initially engineered for your hi-fi or radio listening enjoyment. To my ear, there was a sonic disconnect between that processed, disembodied voice and the ultra-clarity of the 17-piece band tooting at the back of the "Come Fly Away" stage.

At the tail end of the night, we finally hear a snippet of Sinatra from a concert, giving one of his we-should-all-live-forever toasts to the audience and then launching into a rousing "New York, New York." Finally, the voice and the live band sounded like they were actually performing together. It was the Frank Sinatra reincarnation I'd been waiting for all night.

Marquis Theater, 1535 Broadway at 45th St. Discount tickets available for all performances excluding Saturday through June 13 by visiting www.ticketmaster.com or calling 877-250-2929. Use code EBBOX2.)

If there's a show that can lure the "kids" to Broadway, make them see the American musical stage form as relevant and contemporary, it's "American Idiot." Question is, will mom and dad want to come along for the ride? Hey, if they love to rock, I say yeah!

Expanding on the punk concept album by Green Day (whose front guy, Billie Joe Armstrong, grew up on musical theater, it turns out), "American Idiot" is a late-George W. Bush-era rant about media manipulation and misdirection, about malcontented youth feeling aimless and bound to get in trouble.

The plot line (think "Hair" meets "Rent") is as old as the generation gap, the characters barely developed in the snippets of dialogue.

But Armstrong's score-settling rock is ruthlessly cynical, dramatic and often anthemic, and here dressed in a variety of new garb, sometimes with acoustic guitar or arty strings or with massed cast-vocal arrangements.

And do the performers (headed by Wilmington, Del., native and "Spring Awakening" veteran John Gallagher Jr.), and staging team ever build a creative head of steam that whips you up and spins you around, feeling the characters' anger, pain and dreams gone sour.

The towering set dominated by slogan-flashing TV screens is an amazing work of kinetic art. The stage shtick of director Michael Mayer (another "Spring Awakening" alum) includes the best bit of "flying" since "Peter Pan" and maybe kinkiest evocation of getting high, um, ever. And the body slamming choreography by Steven Hoggett is incredibly visceral and effective, bested by an Iraq battle scene that is (sadly) to die for. "Idiots" of the world, arise!

St. James Theatre, 246 W. 44th St.

Tickets available Monday-Friday, 8 p.m., Saturday, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., 212-239-6200 or Telecharge.com.