Last weekend’s stunning performance of the hit musical “Rock of Ages” by the drama team at Meridian High School in Falls Church revolved around two of the most iconic songs of the 1980s, two of the three very best of the decade. While music from that decade, of Styx, Bon Jovi, Pat Benatar, Twisted Sister, Steve Perry, Poison, Europe and others built around a less formidable story plot made up the essential content of the show, it was the songs of Foreigner and Journey that stood out.
In the first half, it was a rendition of Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is,” a truly moving rock number backed by a choir that gave it an almost spiritual connotation. The original hit was released in the midst of the horrific AIDS crisis, when literally hundreds of thousands of mostly young men were struck down in the primes of their lives with a terrible, fatal and then incurable contagion that stripped them of their youth, their minds toward the end, and in far far too many cases, their families and friends as well.
As I wrote in my book, “Extraordinary Hearts,” it can be imagined that that song resonated down the corridors of hospitals where such young men as those lay alone awaiting their deaths. Hence, the choir component was apt.
The song around which the second half of the musical hinged came at its conclusion, the legendary hit by Journey, “Don’t Stop Believing.” Keenly, director Shaun Northrip had painted on the back wall in giant letters the first part of that title, “Don’t stop,” surely a motto for the ages.
But a key, often repeated line in the lyrics refers to what may be overlooked, “streetlight people.” Who are these “streetlight people,” that the writer of the song said came to him as he looked down onto the street one night from a hotel room?.
Streetlight people are, again, society’s marginalized mostly young men and women, boys and girls, alienated by conventional society and out on the streets at night, loitering, looking, seeking. In the big cities, such were often the “Boxers” of the famous Simon and Garfunkel song from 1969, “When I left my home and my family, I was no more than a boy. In the company of strangers, in the quiet of the railway station, running scared, laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters where the ragged people go.”
The song resonates for such people, calling them to “don’t stop believing” because they are down on their luck, facing hard times, making do with what might pass for love but is not. I spent time as a boxer, a streetlight person, myself many, many years ago.
So, those two songs are clearly connected as anthems to a decade around which the musical was themed, with the AIDS pandemic, with the onset of the “Reagan revolution” and institutinalized selfishness, surely the worst decade of the post-World War 2 era in a variety of ways. Nonetheless, the human spirit endures, the point of the musical.
Meridian’s production of “Rock of Ages,” reflecting its billing as a “jukebox musical built around the classic songs of the 1980s,” embodied the energy, talent and good vibes of the original Broadway hit. Director Northrip was able to bring out the fullness of expression of his student-actors, many of whom exhibited skilled developing voices and are unhindered from belting them out full volume while showing a similar penchant for tireless, full-throttled stage antics, “letting it all hang out” (with reference only to energy, passion and enthusiasm), as it was once said. All in all, making for a very entertaining show.
Oh, and the third best song of that decade? Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
