Bret Michaels' Tony Mishap: "Rock of Ages"'s Constantine Weighs In

By now nearly everyone has weighed in on Bret Michaels' Tony Awards mishap, in which he was clocked in the kisser by a moving set piece after rocking with Poison to "Nothin' But a Good Time." (Earlier today the frontman announced he would not sue the Tonys after all.) The tune helped open the Tony Awards on that fateful Sunday night, but it opens Rock of Ages — the hair-metal musical that picked up five Tony nods — every night on Broadway. We asked the show's star, onetime American Idol hopeful and smoldering starer Constantine Maroulis for his take on the accident — and whether such a disaster would have befallen him had he had the chance to open the Tonys, himself (Maroulis later performed "Don't Stop Believing" with his cast during one of the show's high points).

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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