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Review: Roll over, beethoven? At 'rocktopia,' it's time to roll back.

NEW YORK — About two hours in, the touring concert “Rocktopia,” which is making a six-week pit stop on Broadway, had settled into a benign, dull groove.

All of them were visual aids for Queen’s “We Are the Champions.”

If anything, “Rocktopia” will go down as featuring one of the most misguided PowerPoint presentations ever to grace a Broadway stage.

Hatched by the singer Rob Evan and the conductor Randall Craig Fleischer, “Rocktopia” brings together the worlds of classical music and rock under the theory that they are more simpatico than a casual listener might assume. The idea is that, say, Mozart was the Mick Jagger of his time, while many beloved singalongs and air-guitar staples draw from centuries-old masterpieces.

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To illustrate, the six “Rocktopia” singers, led by Evan, are backed by a five-person band, a 20-strong orchestra and a chorus of 30 under Fleischer’s direction. (Before the Broadway opening, Actors Equity slapped the production with a “Do Not Work” warning because, among other problems, the choir members were paid below scale; the parties have since reached an agreement. It is not just rock and classical that can get along.)

Like a tasting menu with wine pairings, the set list is organized around not-so-odd couples: Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra” segues into the Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” for instance — a song originally intended as part of a rock opera and whose title partly refers to the composer Terry Riley. Sometimes the classical composition is used mostly as a glorified intro to the song, as if we were in a stadium waiting for the entrance of a band with delusions of grandeur and a Carl Orff fetish.

And sometimes there is an effort to mashup the two, as when the soprano Alyson Cambridge’s performance of the Handel aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” is haphazardly superimposed with bits of Tony Vincent emoting “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.” Later, Cambridge, singing “Quando m’en vo’ (Musetta’s Waltz),” from “La Bohème,” trades lines with Evan, busy belting the Beatles’ “Something.”

The intention may be to underline the resemblances between the pieces, but the result is a cacophony. For a better integration of Puccini and rock, head to “The Phantom of the Opera,” a few blocks away.

The vocalists generally acquit themselves well enough, though Chloe Lowery exhibits a full-blown case of “American Idol"-itis on “I Want to Know What Love Is.” Only Kimberly Nichole has a distinctive tone, all burnished copper, and she manages to inject fresh life into the hoary “Dream On.”

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The Train frontman Pat Monahan, on the other hand, sounds a little pinched on Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” and “Stairway to Heaven,” as if he ran out of gas after reaching into his upper register. (Monahan is billed as a guest singer and appears through April 8; Cheap Trick’s Robin Zander joins the roster from April 23-29.)

Ultimately, though, the real problem is the set list’s utter blandness. Commingling rock and classical music has birthed such wildly diverse artifacts as Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s cover of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” the Metallica-San Francisco Symphony collaboration “S&M” and the band Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

Sadly, no such ear-bending ambition is in evidence in this show’s selections. Taken individually, these songs are in the canon for a reason, of course; one after another, their effect is numbing. Judging by the evidence onstage here, if classical music spawned one thing, it is the power ballad.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

ELISABETH VINCENTELLI © 2018 The New York Times

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