NEW YORK — Pop music has a lot to say about growing up. Chances are your favorite artists at the time dispensed a lesson or two about finding your path and weathering its assorted heartbreaks.
Three new musicals that opened on Broadway this week — “Hell’s Kitchen,” “The Heart of Rock and Roll” and “Illinoise” — shape songs by popular artists into compelling variations on the coming-of-age story. In a theater industry where bemoaning the supremacy of preexisting material has itself become a cliché, doubling up on the nostalgia factor — for the music itself and for a time when anything seemed possible — is a clever conceit.
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