Radio head Memphis is ebullient rock history BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Memphis Book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro. Music and additional lyrics by David Bryan. Based on a concept by George W. George. Directed by Gabriel Barre. Choreography by Todd L. Underwood. Musical direction by Galen Butler. Set by Bill Stabile. Lighting by Phil Monat. Costumes by Pamela Scofield. Sound by John A. Stone. With Chad Kimball, Montego Glover, J. Bernard Calloway, Susan Mansur, David Piel, and Wayne W. Pretlow. At the North Shore Music Theatre through October 12.

There’s more rhythm than blues in Memphis, but the rhythm is pretty irresistible. Toes start tapping a few bars into the second number, "The Music of My Soul," in which the deejay protagonist based on legendary Memphis record-spinner Dewey Phillips tries to explain to a nightclub full of black folks how their music speaks to him (this is the song Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan wrote as a sort of audition to become Memphis composer). The story — which diverges from the real Phillips story significantly enough that the character has been renamed Huey Calhoun — is a bit simplistic: diversity comes in the door with better music. There’s a generic rock-and-rolliness to the score. And the show is awfully upbeat, considering that its relentlessly music-loving, anti-racist hero dies of drink and drugs at 42. But the musical, the liveliest new one NSMT has fielded since Abyssinia, ultimately proves as infectious as its beat.

Set in the Tennessee town of the title, circa 1950, Memphis tells the story of an enthusiastic erstwhile loser on a mission to birth rock-and-roll. Huey defies a racist upbringing in the Jim Crow South to become a radio evangelist for rhythm and blues (then called "race music"). First, of course, he has to get himself on the radio, where he quickly replaces the sexless pabulum of Perry Como and Patti Page with the sounds of black artists. Memphis, with book and lyrics by I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change author Joe DiPietro (who is also at work on a musical about Elvis), expands Phillips’s story to include a romance with a talented African-American singer whose career, which he jump-starts, takes her beyond him. Hey, it’s a story. Unfortunately, the part about the pioneering deejay’s being thrown off television (though not for kissing his girlfriend on-air), turning to pills and alcohol, and dying young is true.

Like most musicals with a showbiz setting (Gypsy, A Chorus Line, Cabaret), Memphis starts out with a more fighting chance than others. The singing and dancing seem more at home, as they do here from the get-go, in an opening number where black music leaks from the church to Beale Street, turning on a dime from gospel to R&B. The NSMT world premiere also benefits from the propulsive direction of Gabriel Barre, Todd L. Underwood’s spirited choreography, and a terrific cast headed by Boston Conservatory graduate Chad Kimball, a geekily messianic fireball as "happy white boy" Huey, and Montego Glover, who brings both glamour and pipes to the Sarah Vaughan-like character of Felicia Farrell, whom the wishfully color-blind Huey loves and loses in the Tennessee of the early ’50s. Perhaps the best thing about the show, though, is the way in which it captures a time when, for anyone young, radio was the lifeblood, the connection, and a plastic transistor or pre-boombox was like an extra appendage.

Memphis’s first act is a series of unlikely triumphs for Huey, who, having squeezed a foot through the door of a local radio station, moves to the number one spot on the town’s airwaves, defying the odds, the obtuse, the racist, the religious, and his amusingly white-bread competition. It all seems a little too easy, though a production number in which some of the white men brandish baseball bats foreshadows the brief, inevitable violence tucked in at the curtain. By act two, Huey’s made it to TV, taking with him assorted compatriots, from Felicia and nightclub owner Delray to droll radio-station janitor Bobby (a deliciously skeptical Wayne W. Pretlow); bottom-line-loving station owner Mr. Simmons (fuming Wilford Brimley clone David Piel); and, Letterman-style, his mom (Susan Mansur).

Stubborn zeal and self-destructiveness, along with a fierce unwillingness to compromise, ultimately do him in. "Folks grow tired of rebels!" Simmons explodes when Huey blows his chance to take his "Rock Shop" to New York, thus sentencing the youth of America to Dick Clark. There is a soul-satisfying satiric paean to the American Bandstand host, though, lustily sung by Kimball’s defiant Huey and J. Bernard Calloway’s powerful Delray, that begins: "If your favorite color’s white/And your ass is always tight/Then I’ve found your Mr. Right." Amen.

Rock star turned musical-theater composer Bryan hasn’t tried to be authentic: there are electric guitars and bass mixed into his beat-driven melodies. But the music is likable and moves the story. There’s even a Dreamgirls-style showstopper for Glover: "Love Will Stand When All Else Fails." It doesn’t, of course. But rock-and-roll, pictured here in a euphoric infancy, proved to have legs.