Performing Arts

The tour of Whistle Down the Wind did us a big favor by dying before it got here.

The Dallas Summer Musicals substituted Rain – The Beatles Experience , which seems odd on the face of it. This is basically an homage band that has been on the road for decades. Some of the performers do actually go back to the 1970s Broadway revue Beatlemania, but this isn't really a musical at all.

When you think about it, though, Broadway has been failing recently in its attempts to honor the groundbreaking popular musicians of the 1960s. Even a genius like Twyla Tharp went far astray in her efforts to do a Bob Dylan piece. She got too fancy and too cute.

Amy Conn-Gutierrez / Special to DMN

Rain — The Beatles Experience cast, from left: Joey Curatolo, Ralph Castelli, Steve Landes and Joe Bithorn

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Rain is neither. Yet it really does convey the power of the Beatles' music and makes their era come vividly alive onstage. The piece, reviewed Wednesday, starts out with the band's first American tour and the famous stint on the Ed Sullivan Show. It then traces the group's entire career, even giving us one number written after its breakup.

Of course, the Beatles never performed most of these songs for live audiences. As early as 1965 – as I can vouch for personally – their tour appearances were already about the group's celebrity, not the music. At that point, in public, Paul McCartney cared more about showing us how many squeals a toss of his hair could provoke than about the songs.

No, Rain gives us the Beatles concert only possible in our imaginations. The five performers (there's an extra keyboard and percussion player off at the back) exhibit enormous virtuosity in mastering every instrumental sound and vocal inflection on the original albums – right there, live, on the Music Hall stage.

The choice of songs leans toward the Beatles' most ambitious. The first act ends with "A Day in the Life," complete with roaring final crescendo. Toward the end we get almost the whole second side of Abbey Road, perhaps the band's single most complex musical achievement. To do this, Rain leaves out some very famous songs, including several from those crucial years 1965 and 1966. But the show has integrity and a point of view.

Only Joey Curatolo as Paul really looks and acts the part throughout. But by the end of the evening, you'll feel as though you've been taken back 40 years in a time machine, anyhow. Heck, these guys have been the Beatles for longer than John, Paul, George and Ringo ever were.

The light show is pretty cool, too.