Easy to roll with ‘Rock of Ages’

They always say the hardest thing about a "Saturday Night Live" sketch is figuring out how to end it.

And when a sketch becomes a two-hour musical? Based on a one-joke premise of cheesy '80s rock anthems turned into show tunes, maximizing the big hair and mascara?

Well, thanks to the divine powers of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'," the ending of "Rock of Ages" is a kind of a gimme.

A deux ex machina can't hurt either. All you do is reveal your mullet and nunchuck-wielding narrator to be "a dramatic conjurer," capable of scooting the hero along to the right place to get his girl back and tie up this little excuse for a plot.

But "Rock of Ages" is more about the jokes and songs (and songs that are jokes). The Broadway hit - and not-so-popular summer movie - about a rock club in 1987 aims to fuse theater with party-rock drinkin'.

The set extends its Sunset Strip signage into the house, the five-piece band is onstage, and vendors prowl the aisles pre-show hawking "Beer, water, wine coolers!"

The Venetian brings "Rock of Ages" full circle in Las Vegas, and this version aiming for a long run there is far more sure-footed than the nascent one that played at the Flamingo for a couple of weeks in 2006.

The leads are as good or better than those in the Broadway product on display last summer. And the whole show seems tighter. This version preserves a two-act structure, but clocks in at two hours, including a seven-minute intermission.

The trims seem to come more from snipping a line here and there, or cutting a song by a refrain rather than losing it all together, except for Styx's "Renegade." That one came near the end anyway, when the Broadway show was dragging on past the point of us caring anymore.

Let's be clear that "Rock" is aimed squarely at a specific generation. "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" working as an eleventh-hour song does depend on you being familiar with it in the first place.

But a musical about the hair-metal era anticipates a later generation's slacker ethic, shrugging off ambition when it comes to a story you can invest in.

The spoofy road is fine for a while. High-school humor meets the early-MTV rock anthems on some arrested-development middle ground, and sometimes they jell perfectly.

When the young ingenue Sherrie (Carrie St. Louis) asks the smitten young rock club's bar back Drew (Justin Mortelliti) what he really dreams of in life, he gives a Twisted Sister answer: "I Wanna Rock!"

"OK, I get it," she replies when all the full-blown production dies down. "The ensemble singers were a bit much, but whatever."

But Chris D'Arienzo's book eventually undermines itself. The novelty never gives way to a deeper level of interest. At one point there's a good roll of dialogue when Sherrie and Drew confront their broken dreams and the misunderstanding that broke them up. But guess what? The narrator (Mark Shunock) breaks in for a cheap laugh.

You can't really say it all falls off the cliff after the first hour; a lot of the best stuff is in Act 2. Or even that it runs too long. Thankfully, they addressed that. What you can say is that it all stays on the same plane, and there isn't much difference between the first 10 minutes and the last.

But aren't most of us suckers for "Heat of the Moment" or "Here I Go Again"? And the cast makes it easy to roll with it.

Mortelliti is a born rock belter with a nice-guy countenance that fills in the script's short-cut character. St. Louis has to work harder to juggle the sketchily written Sherrie. We're never quite sure where we're supposed to stand with her, and perhaps that's the only mystery within the obvious plot trajectory.

Some of the sillier moments are grounded by Markesha McCoy as a strip club manager, and by Troy Burgess, whose height and deep voice nicely play against the expected archetype of the club owner. Kevin Hegmann has so much fun in the slapstick, ridiculous role of the villainous developer's son that I did not hate the very existence of his character or his subplot the way I did on Broadway.

But if you saw the movie, you know the plum role is Stacee Jaxx, whom Tom Cruise melded into the perfect stew of his own mixed-up head and Axl Rose's. Here, soap vet Kyle Lowder makes maximum use of minimal stage time as the hair-metal god: "This place is kinda noisy. Whataya say we go to the men's room?" is all he need say to Sherrie.

And maybe "Whataya say I go to the bar?" is all that need be uttered at this evening of well-crafted piffle. One thing I did not need? The ushers in the aisles, coaxing us to fire up the fake lighters they handed out at the door during power ballads such as "Heaven."

We get it already.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@
reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.