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This blogger, Richard Gehr, is not an employee of AARP. The opinions expressed in the blog are not necessarily the opinions of AARP and AARP assumes no liability for the content posted by Mr. Gehr or any other participant

December 23, 2007

Richard Gehr | December 23, 2007

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In "Rock 'n' Roll," a play that has already been praised to the heavens from its 2006 London debut to its current Broadway run, Tom Stoppard unleashes a fusillade of intellectual arguments with the beat, swagger, and authority of the world's most galvanizing groups. Stoppard, who now ranks among England's greatest playwrights, was born Tomas Straussler, in Zlin, Czechoslovakia; and "Rock 'n' Roll," which pits communism's materialist focus against rock's revolution of consciousness, is both an especially personal work as well as something of a relief, after the rigors of "The Coast of Utopia" trilogy.

Stoppard focuses his ambivalences about East and West through Jan (Rufus Sewell), a Marxist scholar who returns to Prague from swinging Cambridge in 1968 in order to support communist leader Alexander Dubcek's liberal initiatives. Jan's experience there over the next couple of decades is contrasted to the less politically oppressive, but no less personally fraught, life of Jan's former teacher, Max Morrow (Brian Cox), and his family. When Jan returns in 1990, Czechoslovakia is better while England feels in decline. So Jan whisks Max's daughter back to Prague for a Rolling Stones concert.

Stoppard uses rock music (including Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, U2, and the Cure) as increasingly less potent touchstones for the times. The tragic figure of Syd Barrett, the Pink Floyd co-founder who died last year in Cambridge after nearly four decades' mental illness, even stands in for the fall of communism. Meanwhile, the Plastic People of the Universe have been suffering in Prague, along with Jan, until reemerging to enjoy the Velvet Revolution of 1989. This group's music is far less heard than discussed in the play, which tosses around bucketfuls of ideas about politics and society with the laugh-line pace of a TV sitcom. This fine play deserves a better production, but don't let that stop you from czeching it out.

November 04, 2007

Richard Gehr | November 04, 2007

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"Rock and roll is dead," art-folk revivalist Sufjan Stevens declared to New York magazine recently, adding for good measure: "There are great rock bands today, but you're watching the History Channel when you go to these clubs. They're just reenacting an old sentiment." This weekend at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Stevens offered some bracing new sentiments in "The BQE," a new work commissioned as part of BAM's annual Next Wave festival.

Raised in Michigan and living in Brooklyn, Stevens is known best for his semi-serious long-term goal to memorialize each of the fifty states on an album, with richly detailed tributes to Michigan and Illinois already released. Following Thursday evening's performance, Stevens described his latest geographically specific work as a "bizarre and beautiful ode to one of the world's ugliest expressways" (the BQE, or Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, is 11 and a half miles of bad roadway connecting two boroughs). Stevens functioned as both director and composer for the work, which combined a cinematic triptych projected above a 36-piece ensemble with a quintet of both off- and on-screen hula hoopers, whose spinning tubes offered a childlike visual parallel to the barreling vehicles onscreen. "The BQE" began with the sounds of electronic shrieks and ended with a triumphant explosion of fireworks over Coney Island. Inbetween, the work's several sections explored arrangements that evoked classical music, musical theater, and even rock music. You could hear echoes of "Over the Rainbow" early on and, later, the small-town hurly-burly of Charles Ives's marching bands. Among his many talents, Sufjan Stevens makes you feel at least a little proud to be an American.

For the even more entertaining second half of the evening, Stevens performed some of his more popular earlier works. Songs such as the yearning "Seven Swans," "Oh Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head," "Chicago," and the shockingly sensitive "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." sounded majestic in their orchestral arrangements. Anyone not yet convinced that Sufjan Stevens was on to something that justified his anti-rockist sentiments would have had a hard time remaining a nonbeliever.

May 14, 2007

Richard Gehr | May 14, 2007

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As fairly brilliant as it is, Passing Strange (at the venerable Public Theater in New York) isn't for everyone—which doesn't necessarily mean that everyone shouldn't see it. Co-written by the multitasking rock musician known as Stew and his longtime associate Heidi Rodewald, this epic musical tells the semiautobiographical story of a black kid who leaves his single mother and middle-class Los Angeles home for the libertine (and libertarian) pleasures of Amsterdam and the avant-garde art and politics of Berlin. It resembles a smarter and riskier Spring Awakening, with much better music and a lot more fun (though anyone uncomfortable with the guiltless endorsement of sex/drugs/rock might want to give it a pass).

Developed at the Sundance Institute, Passing Strange begins with what Stew, the play's narrator, characterizes as "a Holy War on Sunday mornings," when the Buddhist-dabbling protagonist, known simply as Youth (Daniel Breaker), battles his mother over attending church. A marijuana-inspired, church-choir revelation that "music is the spaceship in which God travels" leads him to pick up the guitar and start writing the songs that soon become his reality. Amsterdam turns out to be too much of a good thing, and in Berlin he learns that even the strictest German sensibilities have a sentimental edge.

Stew packs a lot of everything into Passing Strange. The title is lifted from Othello's monolog about winning Desdemona: "When I did speak of some distressful stroke that my youth suffered. My story being done, she gave me for my pains a world of sighs. She swore, i' faith, 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange; 'twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful." But it also refers to the notion of blacks passing in society; though in Youth's case it's about blacks passing as blacks. The music is a rich mixture of rock, rap, gospel, and soul; the ensemble was deemed last year's best by the Bay Area Critics Circle; and there's so much subtle humor that if you see it once, you'll probably want to see it again. And if that doesn't sway you, maybe this excellent review will.