It is never a pleasure to pan a show so earnestly good-natured as Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story. Especially when its subject is so worthy and so much has been made of its beloved local star Billy Joe Huels, frontman for the Dusty 45s, and, according to the gushy preview articles, an all-around swell guy.
The musical—about the bespectacled boy from Lubbock, Texas, who, in a short 18 months, changed the face of rock 'n' roll before dying in the plane crash that also took down Ritchie Valens ("La Bamba") and the Big Bopper ("Chantilly Lace")—fails as theater and as rock 'n' roll. The script is plain: Buddy is a small-town Texas boy with a big-time vision, he's an all-American rebel, stubborn and persistent, he prevails against minor odds, he marries, he dies. It isn't surprising that Huels's performance is thin and amateurish—the poor guy just isn't an actor—but other actors, reliably good actors like Peter Crook, also give disappointing performances, suggesting some failure in David Bennett's direction.
On opening night, the bands were fine, Huels's vocals were fine (though without Holly's sweet hiccoughs), but the electric thrill of teenagers freaking out to a rock star was miles away. The problem hit an embarrassing peak during the scene when Buddy Holly and the Crickets played the Apollo Theater and we—the 5th Avenue crowd, sleepy and white, excepting the tall woman who, at the postshow gala, was distressed to learn that the unrecognizable orange triangles on the hot plate were supposed to be macaroni and cheese—were cast as the young, excited Harlem crowd and expected to sing and clap and holler accordingly. It was a failure even the actor playing the Apollo MC couldn't ignore: "Let me hear you say yeah!" The audience squeaked out an anemic yeah. The MC giggled: "That doesn't sound like a Harlem yeah!" Because, well, duh.
