Playwright: Ronan Marra. At: Signal Ensemble, 1802 W. Berenice. Phone: 773-347-1350; $20. Runs through: Jan. 23
When we think of “jukebox musicals,” what first comes to mind is a string of Top-40 songs and medleys safely located in a distant past now suffused with nostalgic glow. Whether the Hollywood-bio or the behind-the-music variety, whatever setbacks the protagonists may confront, the evening always ends on a triumphant note to send patrons home secure in their conviction that hey-hey-my-my, rock-and-roll will never die.
This is not the kind of feel-good docudrama that Ronan Marra wanted to write. And so though his subject is the legendary Rolling Stones, Aftermath does not celebrate the band who refused to stop the music, but instead acknowledges the sacrifices necessary to their achievement of eternal life. Oh, we get a few greatest-hits re-enactments—not accompanied by foleyed-in screams and cheers, but performed live by five scruffy young musicians, still uneasy in their ambitious new roles, shivering in spartan recording studios or blinking in the lights of tawdry sound stages helmed by mocking TV emcees. And when we hear the familiar chords of the Mick Jagger-Keith Richards anthem, “Sympathy For The Devil”, the image first meeting our view (front and center, just like in the album covers) is Brian Jones, the visionary who first set the Stones to rolling, his gaze tearfully fixed on the path of his decline, dying in mysterious circumstances at the age of 27.
Signal Ensemble has mostly worked in spaces too small to allow for high-tech theatrical fakery. Their production of Old Wicked Songs, to cite one example, featured two actors actually playing Schumann on the piano that figures so prominently in the dramatic action. Aftermath’s premiere in the Raven complex studio likewise required its cast to replicate every pinky-riff on the Fender stratocaster with an accuracy patently discernible to audience members for whom each note is permanently etched in memory. While its revival in Signal’s own venue offers slightly more breathing room for spectators, the carefully-selected cast repeating their roles—notably Aaron Snook as the tragic Jones and Nick Vidal as the pragmatic Jagger—immerse themselves no less totally in their high-profile personae to evoke, without impersonating, the iconic heroes who set out to change the course of 20th-century popular music, and did.