Playlist.(The Talk of the Town)(Rufus Sewell )(Interview)

Everyone has a music life, or a life in music. Rufus Sewell's goes something like this: "Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers, Elvis, Beatles, Stones, David Bowie, Crass, Killing Joke, Elvis again, bebop, never country and Western, except as a joke." Sewell is the star of the Tom Stoppard play "Rock 'n' Roll," at the Jacobs Theatre, on Broadway, in which the music-life playlist, very distinctly Stoppard's, goes more like "Bob Dylan, Stones, Plastic People of the Universe, Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, Beach Boys, U2, the Cure, Stones again." Rock music, and especially the flameout of Syd Barrett, the former leader of Pink Floyd, serves as a kind of metaphor for Marxism, and, each night, between scenes, the Jacobs fills with a hale sampling. It's a soundtrack that Sewell--as Jan, a Czech at Cambridge who returns to Prague in 1968, after the Russian intervention, and, in the next two decades, endures the disintegration of both his idealism and his record collection--has himself endured hundreds of times. "I thought, regarding the music in the play that I already liked--the Stones, the Velvet Underground--I'm going to really hate this before long," he said last week, the morning after a two-show Wednesday. "That hasn't happened. I can be damn sure, though, that this music has now been completely fused to this time period in my life."

Sewell is forty, English, handsome, garrulous, and profane. To the American moviegoer, he may be familiar from costume dramas--his first and most persistent pigeonholing problem, in a career that (he feels, at least) is full of them. If he were a pop act, he'd have several acclaimed albums, a few unnoticed ones, in styles diverging from the earlier ones, and, weirdly, no recording contract. (Having resolved to be picky, he has no current film commitments.)

In Sewell's career arc, the Astaire overture recalls his father, Bill, who died when Rufus was ten. Bill Sewell, an animator, employed an impressionistic approach to Rotoscoping--the technique of tracing over film negatives--in his own film "Half in Love with Fred Astaire" and then in the famous "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" sequence in "Yellow Submarine." Bill Sewell also bestowed on his son an early ...