Shaun Cassidy – Keswick Theatre – Glenside (A PopEntertainment.com Concert Review)

Shaun Cassidy – Keswick Theatre – Glenside, PA – September 25, 2025

“Well I was 16 and sick of school. I didn’t know what I wanted to do…”

Even though Eric Carmen wrote those words, they were telling Shaun Cassidy’s story. They opened the song “That’s Rock and Roll” which is one of a few songs which Cassidy rode to the top of the charts in the late 1970s. In fact, when Shaun Cassidy was 17 or there abouts he was one of the stars of a hugely popular television series The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries (he played Joe Hardy), was a popular singer and a teen idol, with his face adorning everything from lunch boxes to teen magazines.

It was not completely foreign terrain for the young singer. He was in a family of show folk. His dad was Jack Cassidy, an actor famous for Broadway shows, hard living and playing villains on shows like Columbo. His mother was Shirley Jones, an actress who was America’s sweetheart in the 1950s and 1960s, starring in such musicals as Oklahoma, The Music Man and playing the mom in the popular TV series The Partridge Family.

Speaking of The Partridge Family, Shaun’s half-brother David Cassidy had blazed many of the trails that Shaun was then taking – starring in the smash hit TV series just mentioned, recording several hit singles and becoming one of the biggest teen pin-ups of his time. It seemed to be a bit of a family curse for the Cassidys, after David and Shaun’s stints as a teen idol younger brother Patrick was also briefly on that track.

Of course, the life-span of a teen idol is extremely short – as acknowledged in the designation – and by the early-1980s Shaun Cassidy was a bit lost. He was burnt out on fame. His second TV series, an actually terrific adaptation of the 1979 Oscar-nominated movie Breaking Away, didn’t even last a season. His latest music was not getting much traction, despite his taking some adventurous side-tracks for a teen idol, such as recording with Todd Rundgren and Utopia and covering Ian Hunter’s song “Once Bitten Twice Shy” nine years before Great White had a smash hit with it.

Therefore, Cassidy pulled away from the whole thing. He sort of faded into the background, and by the 1990s Cassidy was writing and directing a bunch of – as he described them in this concert – acclaimed-but-short-lived TV series, including American Gothic (1995-1996), Roar (1997, starring a then-unknown Heath Ledger), Cover Me (2000–2001), Invasion (2005–2006), Ruby & The Rockits (2009, starring his brothers Patrick and David and a then-unknown Austin Butler) and New Amsterdam (2018–2023). And while occasionally Shaun would stick a toe back into acting – he and David did the Broadway show Bloodbrothers for a year and a half in the early 90s – he pretty much set his music aside.

He got his guitar, and again got the fever, just in the last few years. As he explained in this show, in which Cassidy showed off his story-telling skills as well as his musical ones – he decided to get back into doing some musical shows in 2020, just in time for the pandemic. However, in recent years he has done some limited shows around the country. And now he is doing his first major tour in over 40 years – and his longest tour ever at 50 cities – called The Road to Us Tour. He even started writing music again – the smart and theatrical new tune “The Last Song” and cocktail-lounge jazzy “My First Crush” made appearances in this show.

Cassidy explained from the stage that perhaps the defining term for him has been “surprisingly good,” which is what critics have said about his music, his acting, his writing, the way he took out the trash.

But I have to say, it wasn’t so much of a surprise to me. His 1977 debut album and 1978 follow-up Born Late were actually terrific albums, the sweet spot where bubblegum and power pop meet. They were a little cover-heavy, but there was some terrific music on them. After all, the kid had songs written for him by such musical geniuses and Todd Rundgren, Brian Wilson and Eric Carmen – who wrote two of Cassidy’s three top-ten singles.

The Road to Us show cherry picked from those albums, and Cassidy’s three lesser-known follow-ups, as well as some new songs and standards which resonated in his life. One of the most pleasant surprises is that Cassidy’s vocals seem to have only improved in the years away from the spotlight.

Cassidy came in hot with the first of the two Eric Carmen-written songs, “Hey Deanie,” which reached the top 10 in 1978 and is a nearly perfect pop single. He then switched over to one of his own compositions from the debut album, the swooningly falsettoed 60s pastiche “Teen Dream.”

The next hour and a half Cassidy and his three-piece band (which also included his nephew Cole on guitar) plowed through an energetic set of hits, album tracks and covers. Standing out were his sprightly redo of The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic?” and a gorgeous cover of Eddie Holman’s “Hey There Lonely Girl.” (I wonder if the Cassidy people knew that original singer Holman lives pretty close to the show venue.)

He also did a fantastic version of “It’s Like Heaven” – the song which Brian Wilson wrote for Cassidy – and a slamming power-pop take on the Who rarity “So Sad About Us.” Of course, things really hit a boil about halfway through the show when Cassidy’s band started the slamming drumbeat of “That’s Rock and Roll.” The entire venue was on their feet for the entirety this popular favorite.

The show closed out with three songs which Cassidy remembered from early childhood. First was a gorgeous version of The Ronettes’ wall-of-sound classic “Be My Baby.” Then he played his first number one hit, a cover of The Crystals’ girl-group favorite “Da Doo Ron Ron,” in which Cassidy also stitched in a little snippet of the Police’s similarly nonsense titled 1980 hit “De Doo Doo Doo, De Da Da Da.”

Finally he closed out with a version of a song which was on the first two albums that he ever owned – “Till There Was You,” which was recorded on the first Beatles album With The Beatles, and also had a more personal connection because Cassidy’s mother Shirley Jones performed it on the cast album of The Music Man. This song took Cassidy’s artistry in a different direction, an old school Broadway belter which capped off the show in style.

It all was, dare I say it, “surprisingly good.”

Jay S. Jacobs