There doesn’t seem to be any compelling reason for Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous to make the transition from screen to stage—the Broadway musical is basically just the movie enacted live for an audience. Scenes play out with identical dialogue and music cues, while Tom Kitt’s new songs intrude on the proceedings at various intervals, making the musical slightly longer than the original film.

 

Almost Famous—which tells Crowe’s own coming-of-age story in semi-fictional form—follows William Miller, a 15-year-old high school student living in San Diego with his mother and older sister. Miller has aspirations of becoming a rock journalist, so befriending infamous writer Lester Bangs gives him entrée into the rarefied world of musicians, particularly up-and-coming band Stillwater, which he joins on tour to write a cover story for Rolling Stone magazine. He also meets Penny Lane, the legendary leader of a group of groupies named the Band-Aids, and he soon finds himself maturing in ways he never would have imagined so far away from his protective mom back home.

 

Crowe’s semiautobiographical movie, which won him a 2000 Oscar for best original screenplay, is alternately amused and bemused by the excesses of the rock’n’roll lifestyle; William’s mom, Elaine, is a conventional counterweight to what she assumes are hedonistic goings-on. More mild than edgy, the film at least has an original point of view. 

 

The carbon-copy musical, however, doesn’t do much with the same material except regurgitate what worked—and what didn’t—onscreen. Even Kitt’s songs, mostly repetitive and interchangeable, aren’t a patch on the movie’s Stillwater songs or—most obviously—tunes from real artists of the era (Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Stevie Wonder) that are shoehorned in at crucial times. The film’s famous bus scene of arguing band members bonding while singing Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” is actually used as the first act’s climax, where it misses the original’s resonance.

 

Even when one of Kitt’s songs has a chance to bust out of the constricted structure, it falls short. In the movie, as Elaine teaches her class, she blurts out, “Rock stars have kidnapped my son!” It’s a funny line that also contains a grain of truth, but Crowe wisely cuts to the next scene. Onstage, however, Elaine gets to sing “Elaine’s Lecture,” where she repeats the “kidnapped” line several times, to diminishing comic and dramatic returns. 

 

In two instances the musical improves on the movie. The movie’s Band-Aids—which, led by the unappealing Kate Hudson, seemed like naïve teens who were happy to hang out with rock stars, not enticing young adults—are more realistically sexualized onstage, especially as led by the magnetic and winning Solea Pfeiffer, whose Penny Lane is both wise older sister to and tantalizing love interest for William (the plausibly youthful Casey Likes) in ways Hudson never convincingly portrayed in the film. Pfeiffer also has thrilling vocal chops, which she radiantly uses to make all of Penny’s songs, like the mournful “The Real World,” highlights of the show. 

 

Also, Lester Bangs gets a larger part in the musical: he shows up for a few scenes in the movie, but onstage he hovers about far more as a sort of grungy guardian angel to his teenage protégé, providing snarky commentary on the commercialized rock world. Rob Colletti is a humorous Lester, but even more of his sardonic spirit would have greatly helped.

 

Director Jeremy Herrin and choreographer Sarah O’Gleby adroitly capture the onstage and backstage frenzy at rock concerts, but the more intimate moments elude their grasp. The crack band of design veterans—ace costumer David Zinn, lighting whiz Natasha Katz and scenic genius Derek McLane—conjures up a perfectly fizzy early ’70s atmosphere. 

 

As a musical, Almost Famous hits most of its marks, yet ends up like an OK cover version of a favorite tune: close but no cigar.