Review: HEARTBREAK HOTEL at Theatre By The Sea

Theatre By The Sea wrapped up its 92nd season with the hip-swaying, leg-lunging Elvis bio-musical Heartbreak Hotel that had the near sell-out crowd dancing and strutting down their own memory lane of the King of Rock & Roll, Elvis Presley.

Joe Hebel plays an energetic Presley, something harder than you think to pull off, between the original-for-its-time dance movements, to the slicked black gelled hair and the Mississippi accent.  Hebel captures the difficult intricacies of a flawed character unraveling before your very eyes. 

Heartbreak Hotel did not follow the typical path of what you would see in a Broadway production, instead premiering at the Oguinquit Theatre in 2017 and finding its way around the country and through multiple countries on its road back to New England. 

The production features 40 of Elvis' most memorable songs including "Heartbreak Hotel", "Hound Dog", "Jailhouse Rock", "All Shook Up", "Blue Suede Shoes", "Good Rockin Tonight" and so many more. The bio-musical takes you from Elvis humbled beginnings in poverty in Tupeo, Misissippi, to his difficulties securing an initial record contract to his phenomenal success and tumultuous fall from the thrown to his 1968 Comeback Special that put him back on the Rock & Roll map.  

In addition to Hebel's stand-out performance as the King, young Elvis is played by an incredible Laird LaCoste, a supremely-talented six grader from Scituate, MA whose starring in the feature film "Sleepwalker" this fall.  This kid is going places fast and in one particular scene where he plays guitar (A guitar player for real) alongside his older self, LaCoste holds his own and then some.  Other notable performances include Melanie Souza and Fred Sullivan Jr. as Elvis' grounded parents Gladys and Vernon Presley, Kevin Patrick Martin as the jealous Frank Sinatra and Kevin B. McGlynn as the grumpy Colonel Tom Parker.  Nikki Snelson, after 30 plus years on Broadway, made her directorial debut at the Theatre By The Sea, also choreographing the show, neither a small feat.  

Like many flawed characters, you find yourself pulling for a younger version of Elvis as he faces rejections and revel with him in his monumental success only to deplore him once fame gets too much for him.  One particular scene where he tells his original bandmates that people are only there to see him and not them, sticks out as a time I would have liked to have seen the King fall off the stage.

One criticism of the Heartbreak Hotel book is that they would have been served better if they had incorporated a narrator- LaCoste could would have been incredible at it and could have definitely handled it-just to keep the audience in tune to what's going on.  A lot of people in the crowd knew little of Elvis' story and when they dedicated a minute of the performance to announce that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot in Memphis, which had nothing to do with the performance to that point, how many of those watching knew that Elvis was born in Memphis? Or when they ended the performance with his well-known television special that proved to be a comeback for the King in 1968, my wife and I only knew that by googling it after that it was, in fact, a major comeback for the King.  And there were other scenes like this we couldn't exactly wrap our mind around.