It’s a Tuesday night at the John W. Engeman Theater in Northport, and Elvis is in the building.
Well, Elvis is actually Joe Caskey, a young actor from Roanoke, Texas. But he has the pompadour, the sideburns and the smooth Southern drawl of Elvis Presley, the role he’s playing in the Engeman’s production of the biographical musical “Heartbreak Hotel.” And during a fast-moving photo shoot between rehearsals, Caskey also reveals a bit of Presley’s roguish charm. Asked by an enterprising photographer to accompany her to the alley outside, he responds without missing a beat, “I wish I had a dime for every time I was asked that.”
“Heartbreak Hotel,” which runs through March 2, recreates Presley’s early years, from his hardscrabble boyhood in Tupelo, Mississippi, to his sudden superstardom. It also explores his career setbacks and his triumphant comeback in 1968. The show features 40 songs — including “That’s All Right,” “Hound Dog” and the title track — all sung and played by the performers themselves. Originally titled “Elvis: A Musical Revolution,” the show hasn’t played Broadway but has been staged at regional theaters around the country and as far away as Australia.
For the Engeman, “Heartbreak Hotel” is the latest in a string of musicals that rely on the cast, not an orchestra or band, to play real rock music, according to Richard Dolce, the theater’s executive producer. The first was 2018’s “Once,” based on the Irish film from 2007. “Buddy — The Buddy Holly Story” followed in 2019, “and it just went, like, ballistic,” Dolce says. “The audience just really responded to the rock and roll actors playing the instruments. And so, ever since then, I've been just looking for shows that are in that vein.”
An Elvis musical seemed like a no-brainer, as Dolce admits. (“I had put this in the season without even seeing the show,” he says.) Even nearly 50 years after his death in 1977, Presley remains a star, still the subject of fan clubs (including a Nassau County-based chapter called King’s Court) and still able to conquer Hollywood, as Baz Luhrmann’s Oscar-nominated biopic “Elvis” proved in 2022. (“Priscilla,” Sofia Coppola’s film about Presley’s wife, earned a Golden Globe nod for its star, Cailee Spaeny, in 2023.) For Long Islanders in particular, the Presley legend has a certain poignancy: He was set to play Nassau Coliseum on Aug. 22, 1977, but died six days earlier.
“He is credited with being the first rock star,” says director-choreographer Paul Stancato, whose Engeman credits include “Jersey Boys,” “In the Heights” and “Hairspray." As Stancato describes it, “Heartbreak Hotel” takes audiences back to a time before rock stardom — with its attendant teenage mania, controversy and scandal -— really existed.
“Today, when we look at controversy in artists, it's kind of all almost pastiche,” Stancato says. “Now imagine: This was the first guy. Like, this had not happened ever before. So the entire world was reacting in a way that had never been done.”
To embody Presley’s unique combination of mild-mannered Southerner and sexually charged superstar, Stancato turned to Caskey, who had already appeared in two Engeman productions. He played one of the Righteous Brothers in “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” then jumped to the starring role of Beast in “Disney’s Beauty and the Beast,” both staged last year. After a casting call for “Heartbreak Hotel” went out in December, Caskey submitted a taped audition to Dolce, who excitedly passed it to Stancato, the director recalls.
“I said, ‘We have our Elvis,’ ” Stancato says. “The hardest thing about casting an iconic figure is that everyone knows how he sounds, moves, walks, talks,” he adds. “We’re not looking for an impersonation here. We want the spirit, but it's got to be real. It's got to be human. And Joe understood that.”
Caskey, 25, says he connected to Elvis as a fellow Southerner. “The ideals and the kind of pace of life that I grew up around in Texas,” Caskey says, “I think those ideals are at the core of Elvis' character." Audiences typically think of Presley as the Las Vegas crooner covered in rhinestones, Caskey adds, but “they just kind of forget that he was a good, Southern, truck-driving boy.” (Indeed, the King of Rock and Roll drove a delivery truck as a teenager, according to his biography at Graceland.com.)
Caskey meets a few other requirements for the role, including excellent hair (“this comes very, very naturally to me,” he says) and the ability to quickly grow a strong set of sideburns (“like, two and a half weeks,” he estimates). But the most important, according to Caskey, is physical stamina. The lead role is nearly always on stage, he says, and some of Presley’s dance moves aren’t easy to pull off. “He’d be down on the floor, like on his knees, out of nowhere,” the actor marvels. “And you're like, how do I even do that?” (The answer: “A lot of stretching.”)
“Heartbreak Hotel” nods to the Black musical artists that inspired Presley, according to the show’s music director, Chris Coffey, who also doubles in the cast as D.J. Fontana, Presley’s longtime drummer. “The way that this show opens, it's a nice kickback to all of the songs that really turn Elvis into who he was,” says Coffey, citing Jackie Brenston, who sang the first version of “Rocket 88;” Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the pioneering female blues guitarist; and Roy Brown, the originator of “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” The show also highlights the contributions of Marion Keisker (played by Hailey Aviva), who as part of Sam Phillips’ Sun Records studio was the first person to record a Presley performance.
“I don't know that we necessarily know who Elvis Presley would have been without all of that outside influence,” Coffey says.
Playing two other important women in Presley’s life are Michel Vasquez as Priscilla and Pamela Bob as Gladys Presley, the singer’s mother. Both actors have clearly researched their roles: Vasquez, a 25-year-old Arkansas native who moved to Manhattan last May, says she recently began reading Priscilla Presley’s memoir, “Elvis and Me,” while Bob, a New Jersey native who began acting professionally in the late 1990s, talks of the sometimes too-close relationship between the singer and his mother, who died at 46.
“She was his best girl,” Bob says. “He really needed her to ground him, and when she wasn't there anymore, things sort of went off the rails a bit.”
Elvis’ truly dark years in the 1970s aren’t part of “Heartbreak Hotel,” whose narrative ends in 1968. During a recent rehearsal, the cast ran through a sequence that zipped from Presley’s boyhood to his first foray at Sun Records. At one point, studio owner Phillips (Matthew Schatz) thrusts a copy of the singer’s galvanizing debut single, “That’s All Right,” into the hands of a reluctant disc jockey and warns, “You’re gonna look back on this moment and you’re gonna say to yourself, ‘This was the moment that music changed forever!’ ”
That excitement, says Stancato, is what “Heartbreak Hotel” tries to capture. “My hope is that we’re able to take that slice of life, that moment in time, and bring it into 2025,” he says. “It really did change the world.”
Comentarios