Joan baez

April this year marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Celebrating this milestone – or perhaps cashing in on it – is Rolling Thunder, an off-Broadway musical imported from Australia now playing at the New World Stages.  Marketed as “part rock concert, part documentary,” Rolling Thunder is all cliché – and not in a good way. The two-hour jukebox musical uses a razor-thin plot and woefully undeveloped characters to connect various popular songs of the era, from “Born to Be Wild” to “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and "Bridge over Troubled Water," supported on stage by a five-piece band.

It doesn’t have anything new to say, which is right. If you could figure Dylan out, it would all be over A Complete Unknown is the Bob Dylan biopic from James Mangold, who also made Walk The Line about Johnny Cash. It stars Timothée Chalamet, who is astonishing, and does his own singing. He may even be better at singing Dylan than Dylan is at singing Dylan. (Same sound but fewer of those bum notes that make you go ‘ouch’.) It doesn’t have anything new or insightful to say, which is right and proper. If you could figure Dylan out, it would all be over. Instead, the focus is on the four years leading up to his use of electric instruments at Newport Folk Festival in 1965. This was greeted by fans with such horror and outrage it was as if, live on stage, he was kicking puppies.