The new musical “Rocky” (at the Winter Garden) is an immense spectacle. But it’s a spectacle of waste. Based on the 1976 movie, which starred Sylvester Stallone as the eponymous working-class hero, the show centers on Rocky’s struggle to love and hope in Philadelphia’s dirty world of boxing. Stallone wrote the scripts for the original film and all five sequels, and although this show borrows little from the later movies, the oversized production—directed by Alex Timbers, with a book by Stallone and Thomas Meehan, and music and lyrics by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, respectively—has the unvanquished air of being part of a franchise, a canned commodity destined to sell and sell.
The film, which was shot in just twenty-eight days, on a million-dollar budget, was one of the great sleeper hits of all time: the little movie that could grossed two hundred and twenty-five million dollars, made Stallone a star, and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Unabashedly sentimental but not without its moments of real vulnerability, “Rocky” is one of those movies which flow through us, reminding us that we’re all part of the family of man and discouraging us from looking too closely at why we react so positively to triteness. To insure that audiences will leave the theatre filled with the same empty calories they consumed almost forty years ago, Stallone and Meehan have pretty much transplanted the original screenplay to the stage. But what works in film often feels reductive in the theatre. While film is fluid—forward motion, wrapped in light—the stage is a solid, fixed in front of us; whatever you put on it has to stand there with the irrefutable weight of fact. Stallone and Meehan work with Timbers to reduce that solidity. Saturated with image after image, the Broadway version of “Rocky” takes on a kind of Game Boy jitteriness, a hyperactivity that distracts us, for a time, from any possibility of criticism.
You know the story: It’s 1975, and the pale-skinned, black-haired Rocky Balboa (Andy Karl) is barely scraping by in Philadelphia. He’s a boxer, but he’s getting long in the tooth and isn’t much of a contender for anything. Rocky pays the rent by working as the muscle for a loan shark, but he is too nice to really hurt anyone. What he most enjoys is hanging out in his small, cluttered apartment with his two turtles. He picked them up at a pet store, where the bespectacled, socially awkward Adrian (Margo Seibert) is a salesclerk. Adrian’s older brother, Paulie (a too operatic Danny Mastrogiorgio), is a friend of Rocky’s; Paulie works as a meat packer, and sometimes, when he’s drunk, he’s filled with bitterness and recrimination. His words can have a bloody effect; they demean and demolish the innocent Adrian, robbing her of the sense that she’s worth loving at all. Adrian’s occasionally plucky but mostly beaten-down affect—she’s no contender in the boxing ring of love—is what makes Rocky fall for her. Her insecurities mirror his own and draw out his chivalrous nature. He’s a poetical dude with excellent delts. (The romance at the center of “Rocky”—aside from Rocky’s romance with his own sensitivity—is a variation on the shy, tender love that Paddy Chayefsky depicted in his 1955 Oscar-winning screenplay for “Marty.”)
Rocky works out at a small gym downtown, which is run by Mickey Goldmill (Dakin Matthews). Back in the day, Mickey was a fighter himself; now he coaches hungry up-and-comers who turn up their battered noses at the sight of Rocky—he’s a loser, and who wants to be associated with that? But Rocky is lifted out of professional obscurity when the undefeated heavyweight champion Apollo Creed (played joyously and attractively by Terence Archie) comes to town. Creed is slated to fight Mac Lee Green at the Philadelphia Spectrum on New Year’s Day, 1976—the day that marks the beginning of the American Bicentennial—but Green has injured his hand. As promoters and managers scramble for a replacement, Creed points to the last guy anyone would choose: Rocky, who also goes by the nickname the Italian Stallion. For Creed, it’s all about advertising; he likes the way Rocky’s moniker will look, alongside his name, on a marquee in our nation’s cradle of freedom. In any case, Rocky accepts the challenge. He trains hard. (The show’s completely undistinguished score retains the movie composer Bill Conti’s famous “Gonna Fly Now” workout number, and, in the performance I saw, it got the biggest hand of the evening.) In the end, Adrian gives herself up to Rocky’s love, and by the time Apollo and Rocky finally meet in the ring the outcome hardly matters to us: Rocky has already triumphed.
When the movie “Rocky” came out, it was said that the 1952-56 World Heavyweight Champion, Rocky Marciano, was an inspiration for Stallone’s character. At one point in the show, we see the ghost of Marciano shadowboxing, and it’s one of the musical’s few moments that are touching without being exploited for that very reason. Instead, Timbers leaves well enough alone and allows the scene to be an homage, one that harks back to the glory days of fighting and carries echoes of A. J. Liebling’s vivid description of Marciano’s presence in the world and in the ring. Writing in this magazine in 1952, Liebling spoke of Marciano as a fighter with a “trace of intellection.” He went on, “Marciano isn’t a hard man to keep in a good humor. . . . His face, like his body, is craggy . . . and almost always, when he is outside the ring, has a pleasant asymmetrical grin on it. It is the grin of a shy fellow happy to be recognized, at last, as a member of the gang in good standing.”
Karl manages to incorporate some of that feeling into his performance—when someone says something crappy that makes his lovely smile disappear, you want to pick it up off the floor for him. So it’s a pity that he doesn’t have much interpretive work to do; he’s sketching on top of Stallone’s sketch of Marciano, down to Marciano’s New England accent and the movie Rocky’s little black hat. But how could he do anything else? Stallone’s version is too deeply imprinted on our collective imagination. It doesn’t help that the line between Rocky and Stallone was blurry in real life—at least, when it came to the fight for recognition. (Or that it was purposefully blurred by people trying to capitalize on the movie’s success: after “Rocky” came out, a soft-core porn flick starring a young Stallone was unearthed and re-billed as “The Italian Stallion.”) Karl has to play to all this, and he does so willingly—he’s a sweet star, and he understands how his body works in a scene. But, no matter how much he flexes, he can’t change the musical’s emotionally cheap structure. In any case, this show—more of a “happening”—isn’t about character or motivation; it’s about sets. And if you don’t have enough craft and personality to survive a scene change—which Seibert doesn’t—you’re toast.
Timbers, like Karl, has to contend with the simulacrum problem—that is, the challenge of making something new out of something tried and tested. In the past four years, Timbers, who is thirty-five, has directed two Off-Broadway shows that transferred to Broadway, carrying with them a degree of intelligence that is rarely exhibited at theatres above Fourteenth Street: “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” (2010) and “Peter and the Starcatcher” (2012). Those shows had a kind of intimacy that Timbers can only sneak into “Rocky.” His direction of the women in the cast is especially negligible: he builds a grownup, sweatier Boys Town. Timbers has made Seibert so recessive that her portrayal feels like a faded pencil drawing—we can see her, but we can’t quite make her out. And, because he isn’t able to be fully himself here, he borrows too much from the work of other directors and designers, including David Cromer’s deep, dark stage pictures, Samuel Leve and Jean Rosenthal’s historic designs for Orson Welles’s 1937 production of “Julius Caesar,” Gordon Craig’s ideas about symbolism in theatre, and the cinematographer Gregg Toland’s Expressionist lighting in films ranging from “The Long Voyage Home” to “Citizen Kane.” What we see onstage may be someone’s vision of the Philadelphia underworld, but it’s not Timbers’s. His best work is about the destruction of forms, which he leaves splayed before us, to our horror or delight. Here, instead, he takes on the unenviable task of resuscitating a monster, rank with the scent of its own cravenness, with the cold calculation of its sentimental heart. ♦