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Arts & Entertainment

"In My Life" Stays True To Beatles' Legacy

Musical chronicles career of the Beatles with accurate pitch and audience interaction.

Almost everyone knows that The Beatles are one of the most acclaimed bands in rock and roll history because their music has the hypnotic qualities that make teenage girls scream and artists today and yesterday cite them as one of their influences.

While many of us don’t have the opportunity to see the two surviving Beatles Paul McCartney or Ringo Starr live in concert these days, the closest thing to watching an actual Beatles concert happened at last Saturday’s “In My Life—A Musical Theatre Tribute to The Beatles” musical at the .

You mean just another tribute band? No, because not all tribute bands are alike.

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This one makes an attempt to portray the Beatles—John Lennon (Tyson Kelly), Paul McCartney (Benjamin Chadwick), George Harrison (Robert Bielma) and Ringo Starr (Axel Clark)—as authentically as possible, from their singing to the myriad of guitars used throughout the band’s decade-long career. Listening to songs like “Penny Lane” or “I Want To Hold Your Hand” from this tribute band was almost like listening to the original icons themselves.

While the great repertoire of songs hold this musical together, the audience also gets the opportunity to relive the most important moments of The Beatles’ epic legacy, which spans the entire 1960s period. The actors that portray the band members connect with the crowd through their lovable sense of humors and cheeky banter. When the performers asked for cheers and shouts, the audience obliged with enthusiastic support. 

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As one watches The Beatles progress throughout that decade, the band's manager Brian Epstein (Mark Nager) makes his presence known throughout the musical, narrating his side of the story starting from his discovery of the Fab Four at the Cavern Club in Liverpool up until after the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Epstein plays a very important role in this show, not only because he was the man who discovered the group, but he also influenced their personal touch with audiences and, of course, their fashion sense. Who could forget the image of the four dressed up in suits on their arrival at New York’s JFK Airport in 1964?

This show is not just about reliving the breakthrough Ed Sullivan Show performances in 1964 that 78 million people watched on television, or reviving their deafening and packed Shea Stadium concert in 1965, it also touches on the band’s intimate moments in the recording studio. The audience observes the four in the studio as they struggle to reconcile their creative differences after Epstein’s death in 1967, a couple months after the release of Sgt. Pepper.

The audience’s reactions throughout the performance reflect each of the scenes in the play. The crowd's cheers as the band enters the Shea Stadium scene mirrors the loud, bombastic crowd that originally rooted them on in 1965. However, the audience stays largely silent throughout the band’s scenes inside the studio, wwatching them polish up a few songs and noting the personality differences of each of the band members as the Beatles’ star power progressed.

While the music and the enthusiasm take on a powerful force throughout the show, the visuals in the background were sparse and minimalistic at best, mostly of newsreel montages from the early days of The Beatles and the psychedelic colors of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. However, the standout visual of the night occurs when a video from a Paul McCartney TV special in 1973 appears, showing ordinary people singing a medley of Beatles songs before the second act of the musical.

The lack of strong visuals in this musical is most likely a signal to the audience: don’t focus on what’s in the background, focus on the music and the emotions that we’re trying to portray. And rightly so, the music and the personalities of the Beatles should be the main attraction of this show.

As for inspiration for this well-produced musical, Tom Maher, one of the co-producers alongside Andy Nagle, said that a friend gave him a biography on Epstein, which was the basis of the “In My Life” musical.

“It took a while to get the pacing, but we are happy with the results,” Maher said.

Maher added that he wanted to make the portrayal as accurate as possible, with the band using the exact gear from the box amps to the guitars. Even the costumes they used throughout the performance—from the suits to the ensembles they wore during their Sgt. Pepper’s period—mirrored the originals designs.

Indeed, the creators of the musical and the guys who portrayed the Fab Four exceeded their efforts to suspend the audience’s disbelief that these young men were just acting. Because, these weren’t just four guys who liked the Beatles and wore their costumes while singing a dozen songs. For one night in Cerritos, they were the Beatles.

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