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posted 10/20/09 03:20 PM | updated 10/20/09 03:20 PM
Featured Post! | Views: 142 | Comments : 9 | Theatre

Rock Music Will Never Die

By Jeremy M. Barker
Arts Editor
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Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, which opened at ACT Theatre last weekend (through Nov. 9, tickets $10-$37.50), is all about how rock music expanded minds behind the Iron Curtain and helped liberate the masses from Communism. It's a swansong to the Sixties and buys into all the tired cliches about the power of music, particularly the sort that appeals to Baby Boomers.

Misha Berson loved it, but I didn't at all (I half wonder if we didn't see it on different nights(, and not just because I don't like the themes. For instance, she wrote that, "Instead of the cumbersome slide projections in the Broadway staging of Rock 'n' Roll, ACT uses chalk, paper and spray paint to indicate the passing years. And Stoppard's specified sound clips of '60s rock (by Bob Dylan, the Doors, Pink Floyd, et al.) are smoothly inserted."

Personally, I think she's dead wrong on both counts there, which is just the beginning of the show's problems, but you're free to decide who to believe. All I can say is that when I was shown the above clip from Kids in the Hall yesterday, I knew it said everything I could ever want to say about the play. And it's funnier.
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it was painful.....
i was wondering what you were going to say about that trainwreck.
Comment by micah
4 days ago
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A different take
Look, I'm as sick of the classic rock canon as the next person, but I think you jumped too quickly at this production.

First off, while there were a few elements of the canon in the background music, I hardly consider Venus in Furs to be boomer-friendly. Most boomers probably don't know the Velvet Underground original, and how many do you think know the Plastic People of the Universe version? Syd Barrett, the muse of this tale, also isn't exactly mainstream. Listen to the 1st Pink Floyd album - few do - and you'll see it's not Dark Side of the Moon-lite. It's experimental, crazy stuff, that rightly has vanished into oblivion. I doubt any of the audience could accurately identify all of the walk-in music, which was all moderately obscure (Bowie's Black Country Rock, anyone?) And, while the audience skewed typically old, there was a reasonable mix of generations.

And, while the music is the hook for the story, it's hardly the only thing going on here.

Finally, I think it's one thing to be sitting here in fat, capitalist USA, just soooo tired of hearing the same old songs vs. imagining what it would be like to be in sitting in Czechoslovakia and have the state police literally put you in prison for listening to forbidden art.

It's a flawed production - as are all - but my god, it's Stoppard.

Last night in the post-play discussion, I asked why they thought Stoppard treated going to see the Rolling Stones (ultimate capitalist sellouts) as such a joyous thing, and didn't dig deeper into it being a capitulation to capitalism. The answer was that the posters advertising the show read 'The Tanks are Leaving, the Stones are Coming'. Pretty hard to imagine what that would feel like.
Comment by bilco
3 days ago
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What does it take to get a comment approved?
C'mon JMB - I posted a thoughtful and polite comment around 6 last night, and it seems to be hung up in the 'approval' process.

Wait, let me guess, this is an homage to the Czech thought police Stoppard writes about!
Comment by bilco
2 days ago
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RE: What does it take to get a comment approved?
Sorry about the delay, bilco. I'll up your level of trustedness so you don't get stuck in the approval-queue again.
Comment by Michael van Baker
2 days ago
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RE: What does it take to get a comment approved?
Bilco--sorry about the delay, we're hoping to get a technical fix in to let us know when new comments are pending, otherwise we got to just manually check and no one was doing that last night. It's nothing personal, obviously.

As for your points about the play, I'm waffling back and forth. I really didn't like it for two reasons: one, I thought the production was bad, and two, I thought the script itself was disappointing. But other people's responses ranged from Misha Berson's "I loved it" to Brendan Kiley's "It's okay," so I'm trying not to push it; maybe I saw it on a bad night for them and that's coloring it.

Quite the opposite of your suggestion about capitalist USA leisure making it hard to interpret, one of my big problems with the show is that it's actually quite didactic, but didactic about a subject most people don't know about anymore. The intellectual debates Ferdinand and Jan and Max have are essentially Reader's Digest versions of that discourse, and they hit every bullet point along the way--how do you remain a Communist after '56 and '68? Is there a third road to Socialism? Do we need social or political liberalization first?

So that part never felt real to me at all (without going into it personally, Eastern European Cold War-era dissidents, etc., are a fairly substantial portion of my life, so maybe that colors it, too).

And this was compounded by my feeling that the actors playing these characters were at a bit of a loss: on the one hand, they're ciphers for a real historical intellectual debate, and on the other, they have to connect that to the very concrete details of their characters' daily lives. The power the show can have comes from the confluence of those through lines, and in this case, their exploration of the personal lives was deeply flawed. I would say the director's responsible--obviously, most of the actors were quite accomplished (I adore Anne Allgood, she was one of the show's saving graces), but it just didn't come together in a meaningful way to my mind.
Comment by Jeremy M. Barker
2 days ago
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RE: What does it take to get a comment approved?
Hey, bilco, you haven't officially registered. No wonder you're getting the comment runaround. If you do, it'll help from getting your longer or link-filled comments auto-delayed.
Comment by Michael van Baker
2 days ago
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Thanks
Ah, well, while I was one the first commentors on this site, and called for a registration, I didn't see it when it was available.

I'll sign up - thanks for checking.

I've got a reply I'm sending along, pre-signup.
Comment by bilco
2 days ago
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More 'rebuttal'
Thanks for responding, and quickly, JMB!

A few points here -

First off, my comment was a rebuttal of the claim that this play should be dismissed as baby-boom R&R nostalgia. I purposely didn't address the actual political issues or production.

However, on those issues...

If you thought this was didactic, be glad you didn't see (or perhaps you did) "Coast of Utopia" in Lincoln Center. That one was a struggle to stay awake for, and we saw only the 1st segment of the trilogy.

As far as the acting, I thought the male lead - was quite good. He's a conflicted guy, for sure, basically defeated by the system and hanging onto the shreds of his identity. His accent wandered a bit, but he was a Brit and a Czech, so I didn't view that has a huge distraction.

As far as the production - When I saw the tech rehearsal for this play, I wondered about the signifiers about the passing of time. In performance, I think it actually worked quite well, and having them pile up on the floor was a great reflection of the detritus of the years.

In the play, Stoppard's notes call for 'smash cuts'. Great theatrical notion, but think about actually staging it. Very trickly. Apparently in NY, the transistions took forever, exacerbated by a scrim descending for each song describing LP, label, and artist name. Think MTV 1983. Would that have been better?

Anyway, a play that makes us think and produces variant opinions is a good play in my mind.
Comment by bilco
2 days ago
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RE: More 'rebuttal'
Oh Lord! No, I didn't see "Coast of Utopia." I have the box-set of the script on my shelf but I've never dared open it...memories of college lit courses come flooding back any time I even look at it.

I agree that it's good when a play produces differing interpretations, even heated ones. At least people care, right? And if "Rock 'n' Roll" manages that, I guess I have to give Stoppard credit.

That said, I will take issue still with the transitions. I was unaware how cumbersome the projections in New York were, but really, I think they were quite cumbersome here, too. Stoppard's idea from smash cuts (I haven't read the script, so I didn't know that) actually seems like a good idea to me--he clearly knew that too much down-time hurt the flow, which it did.

ACT may have discarded with cumbersome scrims, but they still fell into the trap of too much tech at transition. The main set pieces were two tables--why couldn't they just stay onstage the whole time? And even if you want to move them off, why carry one but use the trapdoor elevator for the other?

The night I saw it, the interrogation room/Jan's kitchen table moved half-way off the trap during a scene and nearly flipped onto one of the actors riding down. I don't hold a technical foul-up against a production, but I think it might be symptomatic of too much unnecessary work.

Also, I think had there been less stage action during transition, I would have appreciated the year change cards and graffiti more. As it is, it felt like they wanted some action on or around the stage to distract from the tech work, and I didn't think that played so well, particularly because the lighting was so weird, with them carrying the cards through in half black-out.
Comment by Jeremy M. Barker
2 days ago
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