From the
NYT:
July 18, 2005
Mining the Drama in a Rock Catalog
By JON PARELES
LONDON - Rock's conquest of the West End here, and of Broadway, has arrived largely in the form of unchallenging oldies: familiar songs that mimic the recorded hits and are attached to revue vignettes or a cobbled-together storyline. Queen, Abba and Billy Joel are among those whose songs have found that kind of afterlife, and a John Lennon musical on Broadway is now in previews.
The Smiths - a band from Manchester, England, whose singer and lyricist, Morrissey, taught a generation-wide cult how to mope with melodramatic self-consciousness - are getting an entirely different treatment in "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others," a music-theater piece based on Smiths songs; the band lasted from 1982 to 1987.
The show is at the Lyric theater in the Hammersmith neighborhood (far from the West End) through July 23, and is booked for Ireland and Australia.
"Some Girls" seeks the spirit of the Smiths' songs by transforming them. The arrangements are not for rock band, but for string quartet with electronics. Morrissey's heartsick legato croon is reassigned to four women and two men, who deliver anything from keening, primal unaccompanied wails to swing-era harmonies. The Smiths' lyrics were proudly defenseless and unguarded: "I know I'm unlovable/ You don't have to tell me." Yet the staging doesn't wrap them in obvious scenarios. The show is an allusive, surreal, ever-mutating fantasia on love and sex, family and control, violence and death.
The women take on archetypal roles as a child, a young woman and a mother; there's also a red-headed diva. An older and younger man are like a father and grown son; and there's a young boy on video, at first isolated and frightened, but eventually smiling and stepping into the light. They interact in love and rage, but there is no simple story. The younger man, Garrie Harvey, sings, "I am human and I want to be loved" while dressed as a rabbit; the girlish Katie Brayben is at various times a cellist, a trapeze artist and a gunslinger.
"What I wanted to make was a world that was recognizable but somehow changed, very 'Alice Through the Looking Glass,' " said Andrew Wale, the director. "You go through this mirror, and it's somehow different, although you recognize all the elements. What I also wanted to do was to try and get a group of performers who would treat this very strange, dislocated and adjusted world as their normality, so that we could sit there and then go, 'Well, maybe we'll look at our own world and realize the abnormalities in that a little bit more strongly.' "
"Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" is the second major collaboration, under the name Anonymous Society, by Mr. Wale and the music director Perrin Manzer Allen. Both had been longtime Smiths fans. "I never even thought about why I loved them so much," Mr. Wale said. "It's a very teenage thing, that kind of teenage angst, that sense of not being taken seriously and being taken advantage off. There's definitely a kind of martyrdom complex in there."
"It's really effortful being young and trying to fit in with your peer group," he continued, "and this was an invitation to be completely outside that. Morrissey invited you to laugh at him, but the invitation implied that if you laughed there was always going to be something that proved you wrong. There were multiple inversions of sophistication in it."
"Some Girls" arrives as Morrissey himself has recharged his solo career. Last year he released "You Are the Quarry" (Sanctuary), his first album of new songs since 1997, and went on tour; he was also curator of the prestigious Meltdown Festival in London. But the theater piece was already in the works.
Mr. Wale, who is English, and Mr. Allen, who is American, met a decade ago while singing in a German production of "Les Misérables." (Both are now 40.) Soon afterward, Mr. Allen suggested that Smiths songs offered possibilities for "a singing actor." He explained, "It just occurred to me that there was something theatrical in the songs, but what that was didn't really exist yet."
He suggested the Smiths to Mr. Wale, whose immediate response was, "It's the worst idea I've ever heard in my life." Between various jobs - among other things, Mr. Wale is an associate director for several international productions of the Abba pop musical, "Mamma Mia!" - the two collaborated instead on projects that included "Jacques Brel's Anonymous Society" in 1999, which won awards for its dark, splintered staging of Brel songs.
"Music theater far too often underestimates that as people we have two or three emotional responses at the same time that are conflicting," Mr. Allen said. "It's rather rare that we have one pure emotional response. So something can be campy and tragic at the same time, something can make you laugh and also really frighten you."
"Watch an MTV video, or watch a film now, and the same thing happens," he continued. "So why shouldn't we be doing that on the stage as well?"
Through three versions of the Brel adaptation, Mr. Allen said: "This idea was always stuck in the back of my head. I would whisper it in Andrew's ear on occasion hoping that he had weakened, and one day he had." In 2000, they began seeking rights to adapt the Smiths catalog.
They sifted through the Smiths' songs and planned their format; at first, they considered using an all-woman cast. Among the reasons they decided to arrange the music for a string quartet, Mr. Allen said, was that those "were the instruments that frightened me the most."
"When we start to work on a project idea, we always deliberately set limits, just to see where it will take us," he said. "I could have written a whole symphonic score, I could have gotten a rock band together. But this seemed the furthest away from the original sound of the music."
Mr. Wale drew scenarios from the songs' lyrics and from his own childhood, when he watched his parents' power struggles. There are also glimmers of religious imagery and perhaps geopolitics, as when Sean Kingsley, wearing a Union Jack shirt (as Morrissey once did), starts out belting like a rock idol and ends up with the other cast members piled on top of him: this could be Britain buried under competition.
The team hopes to take the production to New York. Many English reviews for "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" have been mixed or hostile. The Independent praised the music but called the staging "bewildering and frequently toe-curling." But the production has one thing in common with more conventional pop musicals: it can draw on the band's fans. More than 90 percent of the ticket sales have been online, rather than the usual 50 percent, suggesting a rock audience, said the show's producer, Glynis Henderson. Obvious Smiths fans began showing up during previews at the end of June.
"I had put all that to the back of my mind," Mr. Wale said. "But when I saw them, I realized: 'This is scary. What on earth will they think?' "
