Review: Hoagy Carmichael's Stardust Road Is a Live Music Video About Your Grandparents

The art of popular songwriting is composing something that is specific enough to evoke a scene in the listener's mind, but vague enough that the scene stars them. "Since You've Been Gone" isn't about any old breakup — it's about my breakup. This isn't an innovation of Max Martin. Hoagy Carmichael was doing it decades before, as is beautifully demonstrated in Hoagy Carmichael's Stardust Road, the new revue from the York Theatre Company conceived by director Susan H. Schulman, choreographer Michael Lichtefeld, and music director Lawrence Yurman.

It was developed with Carmichael's son, Hoagy Bix Carmichael, named after Bix Beiderbecke, a close friend and collaborator who died at age 28 and left a profound impact on Carmichael's career. You won't learn that in Stardust Road. If you go in knowing nothing about Hoagy Carmichael's life, you'll leave knowing not much beyond the fact that he lived and worked through some of the most consequential events of the early 20th century. The creatives eschew the quasi-documentary format used in last season's Cheek to Cheek: Irving Berlin in Hollywood and instead treat us to 90 minutes of pure music and dance.

If there is a story to be gleaned, it is about a group of seven friends who drink, sing, and dance at the Stardust Roadhouse in Indiana. They later move to New York, where they drink, sing, and dance at Club Old Man Harlem. All go into the service during World War II, where they drink, sing, and dance at the USO Canteen, returning Stateside to drink, sing, and dance at Club Heart and Soul in Hollywood. But like Hobbits returning to the shire, they eventually go back to Indiana and the roadhouse where it all began — and where they will live out the rest of their days enjoying the spoils of a triumphant nation, much to the annoyance of their ungrateful boomer children. Underscored completely by Carmichael's songs, it all feels like a very long music video about your (great-)grandparents, living, loving, and dying in the prime of their lives.

Without the aid of any book scenes, Schulman creates evocative stage pictures: The performers flirt around café tables; a soldier (the positively glowing Dion Simmons Grier) reads a letter from home while singing "Georgia on My Mind"; two soldiers drape an American flag over a box and fold it into a triangle during "A World of No Goodbyes." These moments capture the essence of wartime America.

Alex Allison conjures the past with his lavish period costumes, while James Morgan and Vincent Gunn provide a simple set that easily transforms into five different bars, all delineated by Brad Peterson's colorful projections. The movable set and open floor space leaves plenty of room for dancing: Lichtefeld enhances the universal experiences depicted here with impressive period choreography, which this cast easily performs with broad grins.

Cory Lingner is particularly dazzling as "Charlie Two-Step" during "The Rhumba Jumps" and "Cosmics," pirouetting with the utmost grace. He and Sara Esty perform a delightful tap routine in "Lazy River." And the whole company gets into the swing of things in "Sing Me a Swing Song (and Let Me Dance)."

Vocally, they're just as talented: Danielle Herbert wows us with an unexpectedly up-tempo rendition of "Heart and Soul," plunking the interlude out on a toy piano in an homage to the song everyone learns to play before giving up lessons. Esty and Kayla Jenerson sing a powerful mashup of "Skylark" and "Stardust." Yurman leads the six-person band, which delivers an orchestral sound from their position upstage. It is all balanced to perfection under the sound design of Julian Evans.

As is the case with all pop music, Carmichael's lyrics reveal something about the sexual politics of his day: "Gonna Get a Girl" (hilariously interpreted by Markcus Blair) could be a lost anthem for Incels with the refrain, "Gonna get a girl / Because I oughta have a girl / Because I never had a girl / That's why I'm gonna get a girl." Similarly, the wonderfully expressive Blair plays a solider calling home to his girl in "Don't Forget to Say 'No'". He advises her, "And while I'm out to train / Don't you entertain / Remember you're not the USO." And, of course, he has reason to be nervous with his fellow soldiers singing about "Eager Beaver" and his sexual exploits on leave: "She's sore and lockin' the door / No more Toujours l'amour." If you're like me, you might chuckle when Herbert bulges her eyes out during the song "Ooh! What You Said." Yep, they sure said it.

I'm sure Carmichael wrote his lyrics with the most innocent of intentions. May Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion be judged as kindly when posterity looks back on "WAP." In the meantime, you can enjoy the soundtrack of a generation that has now mostly left us in Hoagy Carmichael's Stardust Road, a lovely tribute to a gifted songwriter.