Smokey Joe’s Cafe

Winner of the Grammy® Award for Best Musical and nominated for seven Tony® Awards, including Best Musical, Best Director, and Best Choreography, Smokey Joe’s Café celebrates the world of first kisses and last dances, hot summer nights and cool midnight struts, blue-light diners and red hot rock and roll. The show includes 38 of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s best-loved songs, including “Hound Dog,” “Love Potion #9,” “Stand By Me,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and “On Broadway.”

“We didn’t write songs,” Leiber and Stoller are fond of saying. “We wrote records.” The revolution in popular music that was born of the 45, the juke box, and the car radio sounding off at the drive-in began when Elvis’s recording of Leiber and Stoller’s “Hound Dog” smoked up the charts in 1956. The hits continued from there: “Charlie Brown,” “Loving You,” “Treat Me Nice,” “Kansas City,” and countless others – an unprecedented string of Top 40 songs that defined the ’50s and early ’60s. The Coasters, The Drifters, Peggy Lee, and Elvis all had their greatest successes with Leiber and Stoller tunes.