In Stereophonic, a Fleetwood Mac-like band struggles to keep it together

“We keep trying to fix it, and it makes everything worse,” says Simon, the Mick Fleetwood-esque drummer in David Adjmi’s Stereophonic, the 2024 Tony Award–winning drama about a very Fleetwood Mac–like band. Simon is referring specifically to the frustrations of working with a recalcitrant snare drum in the recording studio. But in the larger context, it’s a commentary on both the immediate creative process and the increasingly fraught personal dynamics of the band. In the Broadway in Chicago touring production of Stereophonic,now settled for a short run at CIBC Theatre, that process and those dynamics unfold over three hours onstage, capturing a year in the life of a band on the cusp of world dominance. (In a program note, Adjmi points out that the touring script is the “radio edit,” as it’s shorter than what was on Broadway.)

Stereophonic
Through 2/8: Tue 7 PM, Wed 1 and 7 PM, Thu–Fri 7 PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 1 PM; also Sun 2/1 6:30 PM; CIBC Theatre, 18 W. Monroe, broadwayinchicago.com, $40-$135

This isn’t the first time Adjmi has taken on 1970s pop cultural icons. In 2012, Adjmi sent up (or deconstructed, more accurately) the sitcom Three’s Company in his play 3C—and was hit with a cease-and-desist order from DLT Entertainment (holders of the rights on the original) for the premiere at New York’s Rattlestick Playwrights Theater for his troubles. After a protracted legal battle, a judge ruled that 3C was protected as parody and didn’t infringe on DLT’s copyright.

In a piece he wrote for the Guardian in May 2025, Adjmi noted that in 2013, while dealing with the 3C fallout and other career crises, he was ready to give up playwriting and become a screenwriter. A grant from the Mellon Foundation gave him some financial wiggle room. But it was hearing Led Zeppelin’s cover of Anne Bredon’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” during an airplane flight that provided the creative seed for what is now his most successful work. “What struck me most was the absolutely searing, raw vocals of Robert Plant,” Adjmi wrote. “He was threatening a breakup, but the threat was delivered partly as a seduction, partly as a nervous breakdown. Underneath the ‘I’m gonna leave you’ was the opposite: ‘I can never, ever leave you and don’t you dare leave me!’” That is very much the dynamic undergirding the relationships in Stereophonic.

Bredon, whose song was recorded earlier by Joan Baez and the Association, didn’t receive back royalties and credit from Zeppelin until 1990. That’s another side of the rock mythology partly explored by Adjmi: as much as fame can curdle the collaborative process, erasure also sucks.

In a bit of irony, the makers of Stereophonic were hit with another lawsuit: Ken Caillat, a former producer for Fleetwood Mac, and Steven Stiefel, co-authors of a 2012 band memoir, Making Rumours, claimed in their 2024 lawsuit that Adjmi had copied “the heart and soul” of their book. Adjmi responded, “When writing Stereophonic I drew from multiple sources—including autobiographical details from my own life—to create a deeply personal work of fiction. Any similarities to Ken Caillat’s excellent book are unintentional.” The lawsuit was settled in December 2024.

In his Guardian essay, Adjmi described his own collaborative process for Stereophonic: he decided to “to write it in concentrated bursts that would culminate in brief workshops I would organise a few times every year.” That too sounds a little bit like what we see from the unnamed band who congregate in a Sausalito studio in 1976 to record a follow-up to their previous album, which became an unexpected smash. During the ensuing year, couples break up and get back together and break up again, a bandmate gets sober(ish), a neophyte recording engineer (who lies about having worked with the Eagles) transforms into a respected producer, and the songs (written for the show by Will Butler of Arcade Fire) begin to take on lives of their own.

The gender and national makeup of the band, as well as their romantic arrangements, strongly resemble Fleetwood Mac, though the characters of course all have different names than their seeming real-life counterparts, and the band itself is never named. In addition to Simon (Cornelius McMoyler), there are his fellow Brits: married-but-on-the-outs couple Holly (Emilie Kouatchou) and Reg (Christopher Mowod), who play keyboards and bass, respectively. (The actors all play their own instruments with admirable chops in the production, but to be very clear, this is not a musical, much less a jukebox musical.)

They’re joined by longtime lovers Peter (Denver Milord), a guitarist and the producer for the record, and Diana (Claire DeJean), the singer and songwriter who clings to the tambourine early on because she has no idea what to do with her hands onstage and doesn’t play any other instruments. Engineer Grover (Jack Barrett) and his assistant, Charlie (Steven Lee Johnson), whose name nobody in the band can ever remember, try to hold it all together while juggling their own mix of professional insecurity and exasperation—particularly as control freak Peter starts taking charge of the sessions.

The intense development process undertaken by Adjmi and director Daniel Aukin (who began working with Adjmi on the play early on) pays off for the most part in giving the audience the fly-on-the-wall feeling of being in the room. There are times when it feels like Adjmi is tipping his dramaturgical hat to Annie Baker, whose plays (The Flick in particular) focus on meticulous observations of quotidian routines (in the case of The Flick, a group of employees going through the daily grind at a cinema multiplex).

The overlapping dialogue, particularly at the beginning, is handled masterfully by the cast. (Are they bubbling over with creative impulses and insights? Coming down off a coke binge? A little of column A, a little of column B.) But this is also a play about a rock band in the 70s, so of course emotional excess is on the playlist, along with the actual songs being bashed out, nitpicked over, and recorded over and over again during the sessions.

If plays where nothing major happens in terms of plot drive you batty, then this may not be your show. (If you’re interested in a drama set in a recording studio with much higher stakes, Goodman is reviving August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottomin late March.) But though it’s undeniably long, and I am not a devotee of Fleetwood Mac—nor a fan of tortured-artist narratives in general—I found Adjmi’s story and this production absorbing as a portrait of what it’s like to throw yourself heart and soul into a project with friends, cut off from the outside world. The recursive quality of the conversations aren’t merely repetitive. To me, they felt like the minor but vital adjustments made by the band, Grover, and What’s-His-Name (kidding, Charlie!) over the long process of making the record.

The songs, like the conversations, are heard mostly in snippets, carrying the same sense as the lyrics of “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” that nothing is ever fully resolved. There’s an ongoing conflict between Diana and Peter over his insistence that one of the songs she’s written would work better with fewer verses. (“It’s good, but you need to decide if you’re gonna be a mediocre songwriter or push it to the next level,” he tells her.)

That creative fight becomes symbolic of their growing discontent with each other. He wants kids, she’s resistant. She needs reassurance, and he thinks treating her like he does everyone else in the band (that is, brusquely and at times like a raging asshole) is a sign of professional respect. Peter’s insecurities also share a biographical detail with Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham: like Buckingham, Peter has a brother who is an Olympic swimmer and a source of ongoing envy. But it’s to both Adjmi’s credit as a writer and Milord’s thoughtful insights as a performer that Peter is never purely a creature of overbearing ego. Even when he’s wrong, he often still has a point, and that’s a dynamic threaded through many of the relationships here.

DeJean, a recent graduate of the musical theater program at the University of Michigan, seems furthest away from her real-life sorta-counterpart, Stevie Nicks, whose oft-mocked witchy-woman persona never detracted from the fact that she knew how to dominate a room. (As a friend who attended the show with me noted, the women in rock of the 70s had to be badasses to survive.) But then again, by starting at a place of hesitancy, DeJean’s Diana has room to grow over the course of the show.

Each character has moments where we wish we could take them aside, away from the control room and the recording room, to listen more deeply to their frustrations and fears as artists, friends, and lovers. (David Zinn’s richly detailed scenic design and Jiyoun Chang’s lighting design are production highlights, as is Enver Chakartash’s costume design. The sound did feel slightly muddy at times on opening, but not so much that the subtle shifts incorporated in Ryan Rumery’s design didn’t come through.

Claire DeJean (L), Emilie Kouatchou, and Denver Milord in the national tour of Stereophonic Credit: Julieta Cervantes

Though Diana and Peter’s relationship takes up most of the emotional oxygen, the interactions between Diana and Holly, Reg and Simon, and Grover and Charlie also add layers of sympathy: they’re all seeking support and validation in different ways, whether it’s Holly resting her head in Diana’s lap while the latter knits, Simon trying to jolly the increasingly desperate Reg out of his black moods with Monty Python quips, or Grover and Charlie just trying to form a unified front against the tsunami of ego that comes crashing through the glass wall of the studio from time to time.

Kouatchou is particularly compelling in a second-act scene where she recounts the sad eroticism of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in the 1973 film Don’t Look Now, made more beautiful “because it’s coming from grief.” Whether or not she has shared the exact kind of grief (the loss of a child) driving the characters in the film doesn’t matter. A work of art has made her identify with that loss, and it’s obvious that she creates so that she can forge the same connection with people she has never met.

The show also plays off the humor of the recording engineers being both hapless witnesses and participants in the shifting intrigues and alliances. (It’s a show set in a world filled with microphones, so there are times when they’re overhearing—deliberately or otherwise—private conversations.) “This is worse than Watergate,” Grover declares at one point. A Watergate reference also reminds us that this is a story from a vanished era, when major labels (and their lavish production budgets) were still the goal for many bands and the rage of the 60s had begun to drift away from mainstream culture.

At its best, despite some longueurs, Stereophonic works as a celebration of why people put themselves through the long hellish hours required to create something that never existed before. The first act closes with the band listening to a song that took nearly 40 takes. As Butler’s song finally crescendos through the speakers, all the parts finally coming together as a whole, Simon bellows, “We’re such a good band!” Whether or not we love the songs is secondary at that moment. We’re invested in these characters and the commitment they’ve made to see this thing through.

As in the more conventional bio-musical about the Kinks, Sunny Afternoon, which played last spring at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Stereophonic asks us to see the quiet heartache, the dogged determination, and even the sometimes grandiose ridiculousness of these musicians in all their facets. They love each other. They can’t leave each other. They can’t stand each other. But being alone together in the studio gives them a sense of purpose that the outside world just can’t match.