Well, we now know Stereophonic has been keeping music producer Ken Caillat up at night.
The Fleetwood Mac producer is suing playwright David Adjmi and the producers of the Tony-winning Broadway play in New York federal court, per a report in Reuters. Caillat has accused them of lifting scenes from his memoir, Making Rumours, which detailed his experiences working on the seminal Fleetwood Mac album Rumours. Caillat and book co-author Steven Stiefel are suing for an unspecified amount of monetary damages and to block the "copying, publication, release, broadcast, performance, and other exploitation of Stereophonic."
In the lawsuit, Caillat and Stiefel state that the play infringes their copyright and "copies the heart and soul" of their book and “is substantially similar.” Both the book and Stereophonic follow a young sound engineer recording an album with a five-member rock band in California between 1976 and 1977, where three members are British, two members are American, and four members are coupled up with each other. Adjmi had previously denied that Stereophonic was a Fleetwood Mac bio-play, telling Playbill: "There's aspects of Fleetwood Mac, there's aspects of Bruce Springsteen, there's aspects of Keith Richards. There's so many archetypal elements in this play that I think it's reductive to just say this is the Fleetwood Mac bio-play.”
Caillat disagrees. "The connections between the play and Fleetwood Mac and the Rumours album are so obvious that multiple news outlets have called out the numerous similarities," his complaint reads. "Simply put, any attempt by Mr. Adjmi to disclaim Stereophonic as not being about Fleetwood Mac and Rumours is disingenuous." The lawsuit also states that Adjmi's plan to adapt Stereophonic into a film interferes with Caillat's plans to adapt his own memoir for the screen.
Making Rumours was published in 2012, which Caillat and Stiefel state "vividly portrays the making of the Rumours album from Mr. Caillat’s viewpoint—primarily behind the glass of the control room within a recording studio." The complaint continues on, stating that Stereophonic "essentially places the audience in the very chair where Mr. Caillat sat." The lawsuit went on to cite several similarities between the play and memoir, including settings, characters, storylines, and dialogue. For instance, the lawsuit says, one scene in Stereophonic details the 1977 Sausalito Houseboat Wars, which is also described in Making Rumours.
This is not Adjmi's first time in court defending his work. In 2015, a U.S. District Court ruled in favor of Adjmi, who had been locked for three years in a legal battle with DLT Entertainment over his Off-Broadway play 3C. DLT claimed Adjmi's dark comedy infringed on their copyright by taking too liberal a page from their 1970s sitcom Three's Company. The decision in Adjmi's favor expanded what kind of parody constituted "fair use" of copyrighted material in theatre.
Spokespersons for Stereophonic have not responded to a request for comment on this lawsuit. The Tony-winning play is scheduled to run on Broadway through January 12, 2025. The play features original music by Will Butler, formerly of the band Arcade Fire. The show made history at the Tony Awards as the play with the most Tony nominations ever, and the show eventually won five Tony Awards: Best Play, Direction of a Play (Daniel Aukin), Featured Actor (Will Brill), Sound Design (Ryan Rumery), and Scenic Design (David Zinn).
Andrew R. Butler and Eli Gelb in Stereophonic
Juliana Canfield in Stereophonic
Sarah Pidgeon in Stereophonic
Sarah Pidgeon, Juliana Canfield, and Tom Pecinka in Stereophonic
Chris Stack and Will Brill in Stereophonic
Juliana Canfield in Stereophonic
Company of Stereophonic
Company of Stereophonic
Tom Pecinka and Sarah Pidgeon in Stereophonic
Company of Stereophonic
