'Szechwan's' Bandleader, On Keeping Brecht Lively

This month's hot ticket has been on Fourth Street, where Taylor Mac is bringing Brecht back to life in the critically lauded Good Person of Szechwan. Rollicking, zany and heartfelt, it is everything we've been told Brecht isn't supposed to be—and it is absolutely marvelous. Although the show is built upon Mac's typically white-hot all-singing, all-dancing performance, Good Person is bolstered by its house band: The Lisps.

A Brooklyn-based band whose instruments include a suitcase full of bells and a built-in washboard, their look is whimsical but their sound has meat. In 2012, they premiered Futurity, a musical of their own. Astor Place Riot spoke this morning with bandleader César Alvarez, about doing musicals yourself, and how to keep Brecht from boring. Good Person of Szechwan runs through February 26th. I suggest bludgeoning whomever you have to in order to secure a ticket.

How did you get attached to this project?

Basically, Taylor Mac is an acquaintance and sort of a hero of mine. They were trying to nail down what they were doing musically with the piece, and Taylor said, "What about César Alvarez, and that band The Lisps?" They were looking for somebody whose musical approach would help them tell the story, but would also be fun and wacky and not quite on the nose. If you read what Brecht said about music in his plays, it's that the music should be its own, standalone thing. 

What's great about having a band doing the music is that we're an autonomous creative unit. We have our own style and approach and performative language, and we bring that to the piece. We're not a pit band—hired guns who show up to play the score—but a creative group that's there alongside, commenting on the story, critiquing it, and enriching it. What's fun about the production is that it's totally wacky and fun and ridiculous, but it's also very Brechtian without being academic.

What do you mean by that?

Brecht is an incredible lion of dramatic writing, and he came up with an entire philosophy of what theater should do. In the translation and canonization of that brilliant idea—of theater as a way to raise the consciousness of humanity—it's become academicized. The usual translation of Brecht's German word—which I'm never gonna say right—is "the alienation effect." [Director] Lear [deBessonet] translates it differently. She translates it as "making strange."

Translating it as "alienation effect" has led people to think that Brecht wants you to alienate your audience. But Brecht was a populist, a fan of vaudeville and silent film and jazz. He wasn't interested in alienating his audience—he just didn't want to hypnotize them. This is Lear's genius—she's figured out a way to take this incredibly dense work, and make it both poignant and relevant, but also really fun to watch.

Between this and your 2012 musical Futurity, The Lisps have gotten very theatrical. How come?

A band can be very insular. We love each other to death, but after seven years, you get sick of working with the same people. When we wrote a musical, we suddenly had twelve new band members!

Now we're a band that's gotten really good at stepping out of our comfort zone. As the MP3 generation takes shape, what you start seeing is bands redesigning themselves for a more collaborative and networked world. As analog as our band is, what we're doing theatrically has everything to do with the fact that it's not enough to just make albums any more. People are searching so desperately for performance, real life experience and three dimensional entertainment, that a lot of bands are starting to reach outside the typical touring and recording format.

It's the best thing we've ever done as a band.

I'm working on a musical right now with a friend of mine who's a musician and a composer. He's never written a musical before—what would you tell him?

My advice is, do everything the opposite of how you think you should. We didn't have any idea how to put on a musical, but we just put it up. Everyone who actually does musicals would say, "Don't do that!"

We just played our musical for our friends, giving us the chance to workshop it in this incredible way. We never played our musical with just a piano, we always had the full band there. That's what helped us get it produced, that we just did it ourselves. 

I'm dying to see a DIY musical culture. When bands and composers and electronic musicians start pulling their music out of the forty minute set in the bar, and start telling a story. How cool would it be if there were an indie musical culture in New York?

The word "musical" carries a lot of baggage. But in the end, it's a deeply American form that's influenced everyone in some way. Everyone's seen musicals. Everyone's seen The Lion King. Everyone was in their high school musical. Even the most disaffected indie kid was in Grease or Hair. The form is much more open than Broadway might have led you to believe.

Are you planning on more musicals?

Right now I'm working on a space musical, which merges the experience of a musical with that of a video game. I'm interested in thinking about how changing technology is going to alter the way we experience musical theater. And we're continuing to work on Futurity, looking towards its New York premiere, which will be imminent.

I Figured Out The Best Thing About Busby Berkeley

42nd Street was on TV this morning, and I watched it while I worked. I'm familiar with Busby Berkeley movies through random clips, which I sometimes put on just to marvel at the madness and the beauty of old Broadway choreography. But I realized, as 42nd Street tapped on, that I'd never seen one of his pictures straight through. It was a hell of a lot better than I'd expected. 

For one thing, it was funny—sexy and crude in the way that only pre-Code movies can be. The endless scenes of hoofers hoofing outdid All That Jazz. The party sequences made me want a highball, which is all you can ask of a roomful of fictional drunks. And the dance numbers shone, in context, much better than they do in the sad little prison of a YouTube window. Berkeley is famous for his hallucinogenic dance sequences, but I'd never considered how liberating they could be after an hour and fifteen minutes of semi-realistic Broadway toil. 

Escena final de 42nd Street de Lloyd Bacon

What I'd never noticed about the title dance sequence before is how gradually it moves past what is actually possible on a Broadway stage. Rather than leaping straight into fantasyland—the way that SIngin' in the Rain and An American In Paris do, say—it happens gradually. We start with a woman in front of a curtain, and then pull out to reveal a couple dozen dancers. From there, the scope gets bigger and bigger, until it becomes clear the reality of the film has broken down. Along the way, your brain argues with itself, trying to rationalize the increasingly impossible space. By the time the woman jumps out the window, chased by her homicidal husband, your brain simply gives up and explodes.

Busby Berkeley—the original psychedelic.

The Musical That Won't Die Continues Not To Die

Have you had a nasty taste in your mouth all day? Keep spitting, and it sticks around? Brush your teeth, rinse with Listerine, chug some whiskey—and it's still there? That's because Bono and the Edge are writing new songs for Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. And something tells me that Broadway's dumbest musical isn't about to get any smarter.

This could be the worst non-Romney-related idea of 2012. Having already paid out well over $100 to see the show, I can’t imagine anyone coming back for the sake of one or two new songs. That Spider-Man congealed into anything remotely watchable is something of a miracle, and tinkering with it could undermine the fragile foundation that supports this utterly nonsensical play. If Bono and the Edge break the play, it could be bye-bye Spidey, hello Kong. (I really want to see that Australian King Kong.)

So, just how bad could this be? Here are some ideas for Bono and the Edge as they sharpen their pencils and get down to making theater magic. Note: if any of these appear in the show, I look forward to the protracted, life-shattering legal battle that will ensue. It’ll make me Broadway famous!

What are the new spidey-songs going to sound like? Well you'll just have to click and find out.

Good Monkey!

I woke up at 2:30 AM, unable to sleep and assuming the trouble was the six gallon cocktail of coffee and hot tea that I must drink each day to keep my playwright's engine functioning. But could it be that I was awoken by something more primal? Something, perhaps, like the far-away awakening of a great, rumbling beast? You know—like a big monkey?

At 10 PM last night, the producers of the new Australian musical King Kong—yes, that Kong—rolled out their creative team in what the press release called "an unprecedented . . . one-time only event presentation." Why the American press push for a show that opens a year from now in Melbourne? I can only take it to mean that the people at Global Creatures are as serious as their ridiculous website suggests. Playbill has a summary of the press release—salient details below.

I'm intrigued, primarily, by the Australian-ness of the whole project. The composer is Marius de Vries, of Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge fame. The production company, aside from being responsible for the seemingly quite impressive How To Train Your Dragon, are also working on a stage adaptation of Luhrman's Strictly Ballroom—a personal favorite of mine. And the score will feature "new and existing" songs from Sarah McLachlan, Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja, Justice and The Avalanches. Remember The Avalanches? An Australian band, had an odd hit in 2000 with Frontier Psychiatrist? Man, I thought that song was so cool when I was a kid—and darn if the video doesn't have some flair. Switch the curtain at the beginning to red instead of gold and that could be a Baz Luhrman musical right there.

(Waitaminute—Marius de Vries? Sounds an awful lot like Roger de Bris, whose dress, of course, made him look like the Chrysler Building—just the sort of building King Kong liked to climb on! See? It all comes back to The Producers!)

As nifty as all that is, the press release sold me as soon as I heard the words, "the most technologically advanced puppet in the world—a one-tonne, six-metre giant silverback." I woke up the boys in the Metric Conversion Lab to calculate that six "metres" is, "oh, we don't know. Around eighteen feet or whatever." That's only half as big as the ape was really supposed to be, but hey, pretty damned tall. 

Not impressed? Because I'm over five feet tall and have an allergy to the Izod Center, I wasn't allowed to see How to Train Your Dragon. But have you seen clips?

A glimpse of the show opening in Melbourne next March. RAW. See more at tennews.com.au

​That shit is awesome. It's either the late night, the lack of sleep, or my natural ten year-oldness, but I'm calling it now—King Kong will be too. 

In more immediate news,The Front is on TCM. I'm gonna go see how Woody stacks up next to the great ape.

Goodbye to Manderley

​The Rebecca musical has died again, for good this time. The increasingly bizarre story of malaria, poisoned pen letters and all-around bad business is being better reported elsewhere, and is proving to be the juiciest bit of Broadway gossip since Julie Taymor's $70 million attempt to kill every actor in New York City. Just an hour ago, the Times reported that the mysterious malarial investor was linked to a Long Island Ponzi-schemer, which has had the effect of bringing the whole scandal back down from the realm of theatrical fantasy to the sordid metropolitan area that we inhabit. But in their giddy reporting of each baffling development, the Times has failed to point out something crucial:

​Why on earth did anyone ever think they could make a musical out of Rebecca?

I've been wondering this since the production first faltered back in spring. Du Maurier's novel is a longtime favorite of every woman in my father's family, and they talked me into reading it during a tedious trip to Long Island in the summer before sixth grade. ​The book is southern Gothic on the Riviera, like Fitzgerald swapping spit with Faulkner, an image which I already regret creating. From that crackerjack first sentence—"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again"—I was hooked, and I've always held a soft spot for the novel, without ever rereading it. Perhaps now is the time.

​The movie never charmed me. The Hays Code forced Hitchcock to change the crucial murder from a justifiable homicide to a clumsy boating accident, and I was never able to see the fun in that. The Academy disagreed with me, and the movie remains a classic. This is, perhaps, why Austrian producers were able to drum the story into a successful musical in 2006, and why the current beleaguered band thought it would be a good idea to translate the show and bring it west.

​A seventy year-old Best Picture winner does not occupy the kind of mental real estate needed for a Broadway hit, and the atmosphere of overblown European Gothic stinks of the West End in the 80s. What is lush and charming in the book would have been bloated and dismal on-stage. Don't believe me?

​It's not Lotte Lenya. 

It's unfair, of course, to judge a musical we haven't seen performed in a musical we don't understand. The people behind Rebecca put in good work, and it's possible the show would have been tasteful, the script elegant, and the score inspiring. But it's struck me as a bad idea since spring, and for once my gut—taking a break from its endless demands for cheeseburgers—seems to have been proven right.