Buddy Holly musical includes one of the best versions of 'Johnny B. Goode'

My hometown of Essen, Germany is in the center of a densely populated area with more than five million people. There's all kind of cultural activities here, which is expressed by the town's election to be Europe's Culture Capital 2010.
However, while there is lots of music, true Rock and Roll is not found very often. And I don't count yesterday's concert of ZZ Top as true Rock and Roll
Things changed on Thursday, when "Buddy" the probably well-known musical about Buddy Holly premiered at the Colosseum Theater. I had the opportunity to see the show and join the after-show party. So here's my biased review:
Alan Janes wrote this musical about Buddy's life in the late 1980's. It premiered in London in 1989. Since then multiple versions have been touring world-wide. The German version is best known from it's multiple year stay in Hamburg where a special musical hall was built right in the center of the Hamburg harbor. The updated new version will be played in Essen for the next months.
The piece is not really a musical. It is in fact a tribute concert presenting a sequence of Holly's greatest hits. A large part of the first half and the complete second half are more a concert than anything else. There are just a few spoken scenes in the whole second half. All the rest is pure music. However, a Buddy-Holly-Revival concert can easily go wrong if the artists cannot sound the way we all know from the original records. But here it did not go wrong!
The whole cast has to be both actor and musician as all songs are played live on stage. There is no band behind in the wings. When the "Crickets" perform, they really do. Best of all was Matthias Bollwerk acting as the title role. Matthias is a local singer, just 22 years old, and was intended to be the backup for Buddy Holly. But as Dominik Hees hurt his knee two weeks ago, Matthias became the number one act. And he took his chance. He looks like the young Buddy Holly, acts funny and realistic, plays his guitar quite well, and he performs both the fast songs and the slow ones excellently. I liked best the scene when just he and Maria Elena (Yara Hassan) sat on the empty stage with Matthias singing "True Love Ways" accompanied just by his acoustic guitar. Great!
They even included Chuck Berry music: In the first part, the Crickets perform "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" quite well. They even got most of the lyrics right. The second part ends with the stage getting dark and a radio voice announcing the death of the three stars. When the lights go on again, we see most of the cast walking slowly across the stage like at a burial. Then a female singer starts singing a slow blues, just two lines: "Deep down in Lousiana ...". Another singer picks up the bluesy rhythm with the next two lines of text. And so every member of the cast gets his segment of "Johnny B. Goode" which accelerates a bit with every other singer. When Ritchie Valens (Vinicius Gomes) and JP Richardson (Patrick Stanke) enter the stage, the songs almost reached the original speed. Then Buddy Holly comes through the audience, unpacks his guitar and performs the whole song again. To me this was one of the finest versions of this Chuck Berry song I ever heard. I have to admit, that the audience did not get it. During the bluesy phase, nobody near me even moved or recognized the song. And I admit that the Buddy Holly fans I later talked with had preferred the use of a Holly composition here.
Talking about fans, very little were there. Stage Entertainment had invited more than 1,000 people to the premiere and after-show party, but I doubt more than twenty of them were true Rock and Roll fans. So while the majority enjoyed U.S.-style food, meeting lower-class celebrities, or dancing to recent pop music (not a single Buddy Holly record was played all night long), I had great talks with Klaus Kettner (Germany's number one Bill Haley expert), Heinz-Günther Hartig (Germany's most knowing Buddy Holly fan), and Dieter Moll (the walking encyclopedia on Rock and Roll music).
In any case I had a great evening listening to a very good Buddy Holly cover band, meeting with friends and learning about one of the best versions of "Johnny B. Goode" I ever listened to.

[Disclosure: Stage Entertainment provided me with a free ticket and access to the after-show party.]

[Addition, Jan 21st, 2010]
In the meantime there is a live recording available which includes both Chuck Berry covers, though sung by Dominik Hees. Also included is a nice bonus track called Buddy to Buddy which is a duet version of True Love Ways sung by both Buddys, Dominik and Matthias. Recommended listening. Click here to listen to excerpts of the songs or to purchase the CD.