David Bryan plays keyboards for one of the biggest rock bands in the world. But even though Bon Jovi has achieved massive success over the years, it still feels like he is an underrated asset in that camp. He should be co-writing more songs for them. Proof positive: the three musicals he’s composed in collaboration with co-lyricist/book writer Joe DiPietro. The first one was an off-Broadway hit with the musical/movie adaptation of The Toxic Avenger in 2008, which won the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best New Off-Broadway Musical the following year. It also spawned a U.S. tour and productions in Canada, London’s West End, and Australia.
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Then there was the Tony Award-winning rock musical Memphis in 2009 and the Tony-nominated Diana: The Musical in 2021. Memphis played for nearly three years on Broadway and won four Tony Awards. Diana didn’t fare as well, playing only 34 official performances, in part due to the pandemic and that it debuted on Netflix weeks prior to its official opening. It was not the best time to open a new show.
An Unintended Second Career
Still, Bryan has easily made his mark beyond the rock world and into another career that can continue on for years to come, especially given the shaky status of Bon Jovi due to the singer’s vocal problems as of late. When I spoke to Bryan back in 2010, he explained that his theater career was an unintended offshoot of his songwriting career. After he co-wrote Bon Jovi’s Top-30 single “In These Arms” (also a Top-10 hit in a few European countries) and penned the song “This Time,” which was recorded by Curtis Stigers—and which Bryan has said record executive Clive Davis was a big fan of. Bryan tried to sell other songs but with little luck. Then his manager approached him about Broadway, and he got connected to DiPietro about Memphis in 2001.
Memphis was inspired by the life of Dewey Phillips, a Memphis DJ who was among the first to play Black music in the 1950s, the decade that birthed rock and roll. The main character of a DJ named Huey was played by Chad Kimball, and the R&B singer Felicia, whom he becomes romantically involved with, was played by Montego Glover. Both Huey’s exposure of Black music on the radio and his being in an interracial relationship unfortunately sets off societal scorn in the 1950s South. The show chronicles that struggle.
The duo actually got Toxic Avenger on stage before Memphis made it to Broadway, but the latter’s long period of development, which is typical of many musicals that get to the Great White Way, paid off. Memphis opened to positive reviews, ran for nearly three years, grossed $104 million, spawned a U.S. tour and a West End production, and won four Tony Awards in 2010 – Best Musical, Best Book Of A Musical, Best Original Score Written For The Theatre, and Best Orchestrations, of which Bryan won the latter two.
“I Can Do that Until I’m 100 Years Old”
“At the hundredth show for Memphis, I probably hadn’t seen it in about a month,” Bryan told me during an interview back in 2010. “It’s such a wild experience because you’ve given it away. It’s in your soul and then you give it away, and when you watch it all go down there’s a sense of removal that it’s not me and I’m sitting back enjoying it and going, ‘Holy f–k, I actually did this?’ It’s such a mountain of work. It’s 15 hour days for six weeks. It’s insane. You walk into that building, and the workload is insane. To me, when I look at the finished product, I am completely satisfied in every inch of that show and care about every inch of that show. That is so rewarding to see that, and then to be also teaching audiences a little something while still entertaining them. I can do that until I’m 100 years old.”
He noted that in rock and roll he was getting on the older side, but with many Broadway people working into their 70s and 80s, he was jokingly called “The Kid.” At age 61 today, he could still qualify for that nickname.
Chasing the Song
What Bryan and DiPietro’s next musical project will be remains to be seen. We presume it won’t be a Bon Jovi musical since the singer nixed that idea long ago. Perhaps Bryan will return to finishing the musical Chasing the Song, which was a follow-up of sorts to Memphis that was envisioned after that show became a hit.
“It takes place after Memphis and after the ‘50s, right in 1960 before The Beatles came in,” Bryan told me in 2010. “So that small window of time when everything was about the songwriter, before bands wrote their own songs. People always say, ‘How do you write songs? Do the words come first? Does the music come first?’ This is going to be about songwriters and have a story as well, and we’re still developing it. Chasing the Song is you’re always chasing the No. 1 hit as a songwriter.”
Chasing new projects always keeps a musical artist invigorated, even someone as successful as David Bryan.
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