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The profile · researched 29 September 2026
Hairspray, Hollywood Boulevard and a band that outlasted the run
Rock of Ages began as a fringe show in a Hollywood club in 2005, spent six years on Broadway and now exists in two forms at once — regional stagings across America and a touring concert by the musicians who played the original pit.
A club show on Hollywood Boulevard
The show opened on 27 July 2005 at King King, a club on Hollywood Boulevard, with a book by Chris D'Arienzo, direction by Kristin Hanggi and choreography by Kelly Devine. It moved to the Vanguard in Hollywood in January 2006 and had a short run at the Flamingo in Las Vegas that May, which is a fairly unusual route for a new American musical: bar first, casino second, theatre later.
The premise has not changed since. It is 1987 on the Sunset Strip. Drew works at the Bourbon Room and wants to be a rock singer; Sherrie arrives from Kansas wanting to act; German developers want to flatten the block. Lonny, the club's sound man, narrates and repeatedly breaks the fourth wall. The score is assembled entirely from existing radio rock — Journey, Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Foreigner, Night Ranger, Twisted Sister, Pat Benatar, Poison — and the comedy runs on knowing exactly how silly the source material was.
A New York run followed at New World Stages from 16 October 2008 to 4 January 2009, which was enough to move the production uptown.
Six years on Broadway
Previews began at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on 17 March 2009 and the show opened on 7 April with Constantine Maroulis as Drew, Amy Spanger as Sherrie and Will Swenson as the burnt-out rock star Stacee Jaxx. It drew five Tony nominations that year, including Best Musical and Best Actor in a Musical for Maroulis, and won none of them.
The Broadway run was interrupted by a house change — the Brooks Atkinson engagement stopped on 9 January 2011 and the show resumed at the Helen Hayes Theatre on 24 March 2011. It closed on 18 January 2015 having played 2,328 performances, a total that put it among the longer-running shows in Broadway history and well beyond what most critics expected of a jukebox comedy built around glam metal.
What made the run durable was the live band. The musicians played onstage rather than in a pit, in costume, as the Bourbon Room house band, which meant the show was sold as a rock gig with a plot attached rather than a musical with amplification.
London, Las Vegas and a film
The West End production began previews at the Shaftesbury Theatre on 31 August 2011 and opened on 27 September, later transferring to the Garrick and closing on 2 November 2013. Australian companies played Melbourne and Brisbane through 2011, and a Toronto production ran across 2010 and into 2011.
A Las Vegas residency opened in December 2012 at the Venetian, later moving to the Rio, and ran until 1 January 2017. Adam Shankman's film version arrived in 2012 with Tom Cruise as Stacee Jaxx; it reworked the plot substantially and did not match the stage show's commercial life. The show returned to New World Stages off-Broadway in 2019.
Since then the licensed version has become a staple of regional and dinner theatre in the United States, which is where most people now encounter it.
The band that kept working
The touring entity trading as Broadway's Rock of Ages Band is made up of players from the Broadway company and the national tour, performing the score as a straight concert with no book, no dialogue and no Bourbon Room set. Its own billing claims more than 10,000 performances between the members across the Broadway run, the tour and the international companies.
The personnel are working session and touring musicians rather than pit players who happened to fall into the job. Joel Hoekstra has been lead guitarist for Whitesnake, Cher and Trans-Siberian Orchestra; Tommy Kessler plays guitar with Blondie; Winston Roye has played bass with Soul Asylum; Jonathan Ivie has worked with Air Supply. Vocals were handled by MiG Ayesa and Josephine Rose Roberts when the group played the Carteret Arts and Event Center in New Jersey on 1 April 2023, and by 2026 the front line was Dan Domenech and Roberts, with Jon Weber on drums.
The circuit is performing arts centres, casino showrooms and restored small-city theatres rather than arenas — a booking pattern closer to a heritage rock package than a Broadway tour.
Where things stand in 2026
The stage show has had a busy year in American regional houses. TexARTS in Lakeway, Texas ran a production from mid-July to 9 August 2026; reviewing it on 16 July, Sabrina Wallace described a company that embraced the material's absurdity, singled out Tony Nielson's comic timing as Lonny and praised Bradford Smitherman's set for catching the look of a neon-lit Strip club, while noting that some costumes read as generically vintage rather than specifically 1987.
Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse in Rock Island, Illinois opened its production in September 2026, directed and choreographed by Ashley Becher with Tate Milton as Drew, Avery Gallagher as Sherrie and Chase Austin as Stacee Jaxx. A review published on 28 September, from the performance of 25 September, reported the audience on its feet by the curtain call. That run continues to 7 November 2026, with tickets at $70 on Friday to Sunday and $63 on Wednesday.
The band's 2026 itinerary took in Niagara Falls on 24 January, Scottsdale on 13 February, Stamford and Easton on 27 and 28 February, three Californian dates from 2 to 4 April at Rancho Mirage, Cerritos and Lancaster, Trenton on 6 May, Onamia in Minnesota on 5 September and the Paramount Hudson Valley Theater in Peekskill, New York on 25 September, with Rahway on 10 October and The Villages in Florida on 14 November listed after that. Only one date is currently on sale through Live Nation: 26 March 2027 at The Lerner Theatre in Elkhart, Indiana.
The show, now
The concert version runs about two hours with no support act: the Peekskill show on 25 September 2026 started at 8.15pm and finished at 10.20pm. There is no plot, no dialogue and no set beyond a backline — two vocalists out front, five players behind, and a run of the same songs the Broadway show used. That night the order opened with 'Nothin' but a Good Time' and 'We're Not Gonna Take It', dropped into 'Sister Christian' and 'Kiss Me Deadly', then 'I Wanna Rock', 'Rebel Yell', 'Wanted Dead or Alive' and 'Can't Fight This Feeling', before 'Here I Go Again', 'The Final Countdown', an extended Joel Hoekstra guitar solo and 'Any Way You Want It'. Other logged shows have added 'Pour Some Sugar on Me', 'Heaven', 'To Be With You' and 'High Enough'. The rooms are seated theatres of a few hundred to a couple of thousand, so the audience tends to stay put for the first half hour and then stand for the rest. The staged musical, by contrast, runs about two and a half hours with one interval, keeps the band onstage in costume as the Bourbon Room house band, and leans on Lonny's direct address to the audience; reviewers of the 2026 productions in Texas and Illinois both reported sing-alongs throughout and standing ovations at the bows, and both treated the show as comedy first.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · broadwaysrockofagesband.com · setlist.fm · livenation.com · riverjournalonline.com · nj1015.com · quadcities.com · broadwayworld.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
Jason Langheine · CC BY-SA 2.0
bakameh · CC BY 2.0
