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You gotta have ‘Heart’: Talking rock ‘n’ roll, theater, hearing struggles and more with Huey Lewis as world-premiere musical hits the Old Globe

Huey Lewis, photographed in Balboa Park.
(K.C. Alfred / San Diego Union-Tribune)
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If you want to get to the heart of rock ’n’ roller Huey Lewis’ love for theater, you’ve gotta go pretty far back in time — to the drama club of New Jersey’s Lawrenceville School, circa 1966.

“That’s true, that’s true,” Lewis says with a smile, chatting in an office at the Old Globe Theatre on a late-August morning. “I had two lines in (the play) ‘No Time for Sergeants’ in high school. I acted a little bit, but mostly worked on sets. It was fun.”

It would be some 40 years before Lewis managed to get acquainted with the stage again — in the mid-2000s, when he went on as Billy Flynn in Broadway’s “Chicago” for a total of (by his count) 222 performances.

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You can forgive Lewis for being a little busy during that long stretch away from theater. He and his band, The News, were pretty occupied with becoming one of the top pop acts on the planet, selling more than 30 million albums and scoring a dozen Top 10 hits — including three No. 1 singles — between 1982 and 1988.

Now, many of those songs — including “If This is It,” “The Power of Love” and “Do You Believe in Love” — are part of Lewis’ latest fling with theater: “The Heart of Rock & Roll,” a musical that’s getting its world premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre.

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There seems a particular buzz of optimism around the show at the Globe. At a recent media showcase, artistic director Barry Edelstein said more or less definitively that “Heart” will head to Broadway — not the kind of pronouncement always uttered about even some obviously New York-aspiring projects.

Lewis himself shares that excitement about the show’s prospects, even if he sounds slightly more circumspect on the Broadway angle.

“Well, yeah, I’ll be honest with you, that’s the object,” the gravelly-voiced singer says. “But I have a very good friend from prep school who knows a lot about the theater business, and he says the single most important thing you must do is not to bring it to New York too early, before it’s right.

“And I think there can be a tendency to do that with a lot of exuberance. We’re in love with our show right now, but we don’t really know how good it is, to be honest. We think it’s going to be fantastic, but it has to prove that. So we’ll see.

“But would we like to take it to New York? Sure. Would we like to have a big hit show on Broadway? Yeah! Why not?”

Thinking outside the box

This would be a good time to note that while “Heart” is about a young musician with rock ’n’ roll dreams, it’s not meant to be about Lewis himself. The show is not a bio-musical the likes of the La Jolla Playhouse-sprung “Jersey Boys,” although Lewis is a big fan of that Broadway hit.

“Heart,” named for another huge Lewis and the News hit, focuses on a guy named Bobby who has tossed in the towel on his hopes for a music career, and has begun working at a cardboard-box factory. (Can you feel “Hip to be Square” coming on?)

Bobby’s trajectory begins to change, though, when he forms a bond with the straitlaced Cassandra, a company supervisor and daughter of the business’ owner.

Katie Rose Clarke and Matt Doyle perform during a rehearsal of "The Heart of Rock & Roll."
(K.C. Alfred / San Diego Union-Tribune)

Those lead characters are played by two Broadway stars: Matt Doyle, whose Broadway credits include “Sweeney Todd,” “The Book of Mormon,” “War Horse” and “Spring Awakening” (and who also appeared on TV’s “Gossip Girl”); and Katie Rose Clarke, of “Miss Saigon,” “The Light in the Piazza” and “Wicked” (whose touring version she appeared in when the show visited San Diego in 2009).

Clarke also had a key role in the Broadway production of the Globe-bred “Allegiance,” although she did not appear in the musical’s world-premiere staging here. (Meanwhile: Doyle, by strange coincidence, is from the same tiny Northern California town where Lewis lived for many years; he was obsessed with Lewis’ songs and used to spot him in the grocery store as a kid.)

The director of “Heart” is Gordon Greenberg, whose Broadway directing credits include “Holiday Inn”; he was previously at the Globe with “Working” in 2009. And the show was written by Jonathan Abrams (of A&E Network’s “Bishop”), from a story by Tyler Mitchell (senior vice president of Imagine Entertainment) and Abrams. The choreographer is Lorin Latarro (Broadway’s “Waitress”), with music supervision, arrangements and orchestrations by Brian Usifer.

Given the success of “Jersey Boys” and other jukebox musicals over the years — although Greenberg prefers the term “catalog musicals” for those built on existing music — the idea of hitching a show to the Huey Lewis hit train comes as no surprise.

Lewis says the seed of the musical originally was planted when a theater-loving neighbor of his in the Marin County town of Ross invited him to see the U.S. premiere of the ABBA-centric musical “Mamma Mia!” in San Francisco about 18 years ago.

“I was kind of a rocker, and I thought, you know, I’m not gonna like this,” he recalls. “But surprise — I loved it! And that was it.”

And yet it wasn’t until years later that Mitchell — who happens to be the son-in-law of the neighbor who took Lewis to “Mamma Mia!” — got the bug to put together a musical based on the Lewis and the News hits.

“So Tyler thinks about it, gets in touch with his pal Jonathan Abrams, and together they wrote this draft, which was instantly very good,” Lewis says. “And that’s what got everybody going.”

As he sits chatting about all this, the gregarious, easygoing Lewis has just blown in from braving I-805 traffic on his drive down from Pauma Valley in North County, where the golf-loving musician keeps a place when he’s not fly-fishing near his second home in Montana (or elsewhere around the world).

That local address has made it much easier for Lewis to be on hand during the musical’s Globe development.

Lewis is asked whether he had any trepidation about handing over his songs to the show’s team for remaking into a musical.

“Well, there was and there is — absolutely,” he acknowledges with a laugh. “That’s why I’m here! But I love the process as well. I’m not very precious about these things.

“(The song) ‘Workin’ for a Livin’ (for example) has been set so many ways — different people have cut it. Garth Brooks did it, Johnny Lee did it, lots of different people did it. And now it’s a big production number. Well, why not? It’s a new dress.”

Lewis and Co.’s R&B-based, soul-inflected, sometimes horn-happy music is getting quite a makeover from Usifer, as the songs are shaped around a story set in the here and now rather than in the band’s 1980s heyday.

Lewis admits that when he heard the musical’s first raw run-through before it came to the Globe, “I didn’t see (the songs) as part of the show yet. But now with what Brian’s done, because he’s just so brilliant, he’s given them each their own little setting with his arrangements. They really do integrate into the show. It’s very cohesive.

“We’ve gone pretty deep in the catalog, but not where I thought they’d go. ‘World to Me’ plays a big part. One of the musical highlights is “It Hit Me Like a Hammer,” which is sung by Cassandra. Her ex-boyfriend has an a cappella group, and they do ‘World to Me,’ ‘That’s Not Me’ and ‘Stuck With You’ a cappella. That’s kind of neat.

“And then of course there are most of the big ones, although ‘Heart and Soul’ isn’t in our show,” save for a name-drop at one point.

For Lewis, the past few months have been bittersweet to say the least; even as “Heart” was ramping up, he had to cancel a concert tour after experiencing sudden, severe hearing problems in January.

“I’ve got this hearing issue right now, which is horrible,” he says. “They call it Meniere’s disease. It’s a syndrome defined by symptoms. They don’t know what it is — it’s hearing loss. I have a hearing aid and I can hear you, we’re conversing. But I have tinnitus going ‘rrrrr’ all the time. And worse, low frequencies resonate and distort, and they distort so bad it sounds like ...” (and here he mimics a scraping sound).

“I can’t discern pitch in music. It’s very very weird, man. And if somebody talks, even if they talk loud, it’s muffled. And (doctors) got nothin’. All they’ve got is, like, a low-salt diet. I said, you’re kidding me — this is what you’ve got?

“So (the show) has really been therapy for me, because it’s something for me to do.”

Beyond that, “Heart” also has brought a feeling of joy that Lewis hopes will extend to the audience’s experience with it.

The show’s overall vibe, Lewis says, is buoyant and life-affirming. Kind of like all those Huey hits.

“I figure people can use a cheer-up today,” he says. “You won’t be crying, I don’t think. You’ll be moved. But I don’t think there’ll be any crying.”

‘The Heart of Rock & Roll’

When: Previews begin Sept. 6. Opens Sept. 14. 7 p.m. Tuesdays-Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Through Oct. 21.

Where: Old Globe’s Donald and Darlene Shiley Stage, Balboa Park.

Tickets: $39 and up

Phone: (619) 234-5623

Online: theoldglobe.org

Matt Doyle and fellow cast members rehearse a scene from "The Heart of Rock & Roll" at the Old Globe.
(K.C. Alfred / San Diego Union-Tribune)

The ‘Heart’ of San Diego

We asked Matt Doyle and Katie Rose Clarke, the stars of “The Heart of Rock & Roll,” to fill us in on some favorite local spots since they’ve been in town with the show:

Matt Doyle: “Dog Beach at Ocean Beach is the most amazing place I’ve been to in my entire life. We don’t have anything like that on the East Coast. It marries two of my favorite things in the world: A beach and dogs. I expected it to kind of feel like a litter box, but it doesn’t at all. Everyone’s good and cleans up. It just feels like you’re hangin’ out on a beach — and, there are puppies everywhere! It’s bliss.

Katie Rose Clarke: Chris (Rogers, her husband) and I have been to Born & Raised in Little Italy. We were supposed to go for our first night without the baby (the couple have a 2-month-old named Eleanor Rose), and she was not having it, so we ended up bringing her. It was so sweet — these girls at the hostess stand sent us sparkling rosé, and I just started crying.

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Check out rehearsal video of musical numbers from “The Heart of Rock & Roll”

jim.hebert@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @jimhebert

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