Rise up, gather round, rock this place to the ground. Get your gunters in a row with your gliebens and glautens and globens. There's a stage show coming, and it's one for the ages.
The soundtrack to the dusty gravel backroads and gritty urban streets of the 1980s is now the soundtrack of musical theatre stages from Broadway to Buenos Aires. Rock of Ages pumps the glam metal of the acid-washed era rewrapped in a story made for today's live audiences eager for a new kind of musical - one that begs you to feel the noize right through to the final countdown.
Kenya Hamilton is too young to remember the heyday of Starship and Whitesnake but she didn't live under a rock. She was familiar with these seminal rock hits when she won the role of Justice in the 10th anniversary U.S. National Tour Cast, but that cast has now crossed the line, they've come to Canada, and she was surprised by how deeply the Canadian audiences are invested in these songs.
"They kind of get immersed in it," said the singer-actor-dancer who grew up in Georgia and New York. She'd been to Canada, but never on an extended voyage like this one. She didn't know that Canadians took their classic rock almost as seriously as their hockey. "Sometimes they're singing the songs before we get there. They hear the first chords and they're already singing it, so they've been great, I love that."
This is Hamilton's first tour of any kind. She's a pro at musical theatre, she got her degree in that discipline from Ithaca College, but her past credits (Ghost, Sister Act, Barnum) have been stationary musicals. Now she's out on the road, sometimes performing every night for days on end then rolling down the highway on miles of asphalt that can numb the concept of what city she's in.
"At the beginning I wasn't so versed in how to just keep it going for so long, and I asked friends who had done it before for advice, and they told me lots of helpful things, but I really didn't get it until the second leg of the tour - ahhh, this is how you maintain," she said. "Hearing about it and actually living it are just two different things. Self care is a big thing. You are definitely an athlete in some respects."
Carefully managing sleep, vitamins, water, good nutrition and other aspects of wellness will hopefully lead her to future goals of Broadway or The West End. She's happy doing musical theatre as a profession, which wasn't always an automatic eventuality in her head. She remembers telling her mother that she just didn't want a career that led her into the same four walls every day. Over time her pursuit of personal freedom led to the stage.
"It's not easy by any means, but I think my goals grew as I grew," she said.
Now she has to become other people as a condition of who she is as a profession. At the moment, that's a rather saucy character named Justice, the owner of the story's prominent strip club.
"Justice... oh boy," said Hamilton, assessing who Justice is and how she had to be approached. "I feel like Justice has a lot of heart if you look past the fact she owns a strip club with these vulnerable girls. Besides her job description, she is very open and honest and doesn't take any crap, so I can respect that."
Hamilton and her tour mates will all be in Prince George at CN Centre this Friday with enough rock to go on for ages. She is loving the Canadian experience and this city is the farthest north on the show's tour, so she's soaking up the culture along the way. The whole tour went axe throwing in Calgary so the challenge is on for Prince George to offer up something northerly for the memory banks of the cast and crew.
We will leave it at that because it's better to burn out than fade away.
