Big hair, bigger guitar solos, and the full arena rock excess of the 1980s took over Red Bank this month, as Phoenix Productions presented Rock of Ages from July 10 through 12 at the Hackensack Meridian Health Theatre inside the Count Basie Center for the Arts. The high energy run served as the official kickoff for Phoenix Productions’ 2026-27 mainstage season, giving the company’s audience a genuinely fitting, throwback way to launch a new year of programming.
Phoenix Productions itself brings genuine institutional weight to whatever it stages, having operated as a prominent, volunteer driven community theater organization in New Jersey for more than 35 years. Across that span, the company has produced over 100 mainstage shows, giving it a genuinely deep well of production experience to draw on for a musical as physically and technically demanding as Rock of Ages.
The musical itself carries real pedigree of its own, having earned five Tony Award nominations as a jukebox musical built entirely around the arena rock anthems and power ballads that defined 1980s rock radio. The score pulls directly from legendary bands including Journey, Bon Jovi, Styx, Whitesnake, and Poison, stitching their biggest hits together into a single, continuous narrative rather than simply presenting them as a standalone concert. That story unfolds on Los Angeles’s legendary Sunset Strip in 1987, following Drew, an aspiring rock star working as a bartender, and Sherrie, a small town girl freshly arrived from Kansas, as the two fall in love while fighting to save their beloved rock club from a group of greedy German developers threatening to tear it down.
Phoenix Productions filled out that story with a genuinely strong lineup of local New Jersey theatrical talent for the Red Bank run. Joey Maher took on the role of Drew opposite Riley Martin as Sherrie, while Billy Mills brought the show’s narrator, Lonny, to life. Marc Goldberg stepped into the role of rock star Stacee Jaxx, and John Griffin rounded out the principal cast as Dennis, giving the production a genuinely well balanced ensemble across its central roles.
Critical reception for Rock of Ages as a stage production, both in this Red Bank run and in similar regional stagings elsewhere, consistently points to a handful of defining qualities that separate it from a typical book musical. Reviewers regularly note that the show deliberately breaks the traditional theatrical mold by placing a live band directly on stage, giving the entire production the immersive feel of an actual rock concert rather than a conventional sit down musical. That concert like energy is amplified by the show’s genuinely self aware, satirical tone, since the script is famous for breaking the fourth wall throughout, with narrator Lonny frequently speaking directly to the audience to poke fun at both classic 1980s music tropes and the show’s own admittedly thin plot. Critics have consistently praised that self deprecating, tongue in cheek approach, noting that Rock of Ages succeeds specifically because it knows exactly what kind of show it is and leans fully into that identity rather than taking itself too seriously.
That same critical consensus points out that the production’s plot was never really the point in the first place. Major theater outlets covering the show have noted that Rock of Ages runs almost entirely on pure momentum, built around big hair, aggressive lighting design, high energy choreography, and crowd wide sing-alongs to genuine classics like “Don’t Stop Believin'” and “Here I Go Again.” For audiences who grew up on this exact era of rock radio, that combination tends to create a genuinely infectious, communal atmosphere inside the theater, turning the audience into active participants rather than passive observers for much of the show’s run.
For anyone considering catching a future regional production of Rock of Ages, it’s worth noting that the show includes a fair amount of crude humor, suggestive choreography, and content built explicitly around a sex, drugs, and rock and roll theme running throughout. Given that content, the production is generally recommended for audiences ages 13 and older rather than treated as an all ages family musical. For Phoenix Productions, kicking off its 2026-27 mainstage season with a show built around exactly this kind of unapologetic, high energy nostalgia gave Red Bank audiences a genuinely fitting, crowd pleasing way to launch what the company hopes will be another strong year of community theater programming.
