‘The Heart of Rock and Roll’ review: Huey Lewis’ Broadway show is hilarious fun

Here’s something I never imagined writing five years ago: In 2024, there are no musicals by Andrew Lloyd Webber currently running on Broadway, but there are somehow two that feature the songs of Huey Lewis & The News.

Even more surprising is that one of those shows, “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” which opened Monday night at the James Earl Jones Theatre, has turned out to be an underdog highlight of the season. (The other, “Back to the Future: The Musical,” did not.)

Rolled out modestly, little “Heart” is also a lot more fun and proudly frivolous than any of its sober-minded neighbors. It’s perhaps the first time in my life that I’ve been happy to see a confetti cannon at curtain call.

The show is hilarious, too. Set in 1987, the musical is not only a brightly-colored time machine back to the decade of big hair and boomboxes, but the lighthearted Times Square of not so long ago.

Because “Heart,” breezily directed by Gordon Greenberg, remarkably is one of just two new musicals on Broadway over the past year — out of an absurd 15 — that’s 100% a comedy.  

Lewis’ catchy hits like “Back In Time,” “The Power of Love” and “Hip To Be Square” are paired with book-writer Jonathan A. Abrams’ winning jokes about human resources and IKEA. There’s rock and rolling in the aisles.

I don’t mean this as a slight, but Abrams’ man-with-a-plan tale could be ripped from a lovably bad 1980s movie such as “The Secret of My Success” or “Road House.”

Actually, as Bobby, a Milwaukee factory worker who’s trying to climb the corporate ladder, the dishy and talented Corey Cott is the spitting image of the latter film’s star Patrick Swayze in “Dirty Dancing.”

Bobby’s workin’ for a livin’ at a cardboard plant, run by Mr. Stone (John Dossett) and his daughter Cassandra (McKenzie Kurtz), but he dreams of rising the ranks into a plum sales gig.  

After “Kinky Boots,” you would think there was no more cleverness to be mined from assembly-line shenanigans. Wrong! Choreographer Lorin Latarro has the cast perform a campy tap dance on a big piece of bubble wrap that’s “Anything Goes” meets the Monty Python coconuts.

After Bobby goes rogue and fails at signing a big client, the boss gives him the ax. Determined to succeed regardless, he follows Stone and Cassandra to a conference in Chicago with friend and HR director Roz (Tamika Lawrence) to try one more time to win the account of a wacky Swedish furniture store founder named Fjord (Orville Mendoza).

While staying at the Drake Hotel, a romance blooms with work-obsessed Cassandra, even though she’s also being chased by her preppy ex-boyfriend Tucker (Billy Harrison Tighe, a real smarm-er). And Bobby also starts to have the urge to rejoin his old rock band, The Loop.

You see what I mean about the plot resembling (surely on purpose) wacky ‘80s movies? “The Heart of Rock and Roll” is practically “Cocktail.”

Cranked-up antics ensue on Derek McLane’s set that begins as Super Mario Bros.-style pipes of the factory, then whooshes to bubblegum plush settees at the hoity-toity Drake and finally a concert venue.     

This Wonka-fied vision of a workplace is populated by sensational dancers and singers, who fuse rock, pop and musical theater styles with ’80s informercial grins. 

But they sell the tunes with knockout comedy. There’s a Richard Simmons “Sweatin’ To The Oldies” parody, and a dream ballet for Cassandra about how horrifying it would be to marry her ex.

Kurtz makes for a caffeinated version of Melanie Griffith in “Working Girl” — quirky, optimistic and appealingly awkward. And Lawrence, as irritated Roz, speaks fluent punchline. Playing the Swede, all Mendoza needs to do to get laughs is weirdly say sauna (“soooow-nuh!”).

When most musicians hand over their catalogue to a Broadway show, it’s for a respectable biography like “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” or “Jersey Boys.”

But there is something appropriately kitschy about Lewis’ upbeat songbook, which famously accompanied a flying DeLorean, being matched with a guitar-playing hero who makes cardboard.

The power of love, after all, is a curious thing.