Stage
Weales, Gerald
Nashville didn't: a sense of what the music means to its audience. In the Richard Lester movie, the Beatles brought a new feeling of freedom and sexual lyricism to middle-class British girls...
...The audience, who can come early for food and drink, are in fact the night-club patrons the show asks them to be, and there is recorded forties' music for their dancing pleasure before and after the show and during intermission...
...This rowdiness (quarrels, sexual horseplay, drinking, gluttony, out and out violence) is channeled into the music as the kids evolve their own brand of soul music...
...p enn & Teller, like more conventional magicians, call on volunteers from the audience and, although it is better than even money that they will get the rough edge of Penn Jillette's tongue followed by his more abrasive apologies, the audience is full of willing victims...
...Actually, since the Song of Singapore is both a real and a fictional club, it is more affluent looking than the circumstances call for...
...Judging by all we've seen in the movie, the answer might well be this: Yes, Jimmy, some arts are fueled by hostility and, though the hostility can be channeled into art, art can't always confine and control the hostility...
...So does the photograph of Elvis placed just above one of Pope John on a knick-knack table in a working-class living room...
...LIVE/EVIL / 616: Commonweal...
...In the final number, "King of Animal Traps," in which Penn describes his youthful passion for collecting lethal traps while the dexterous Teller plays in and out of the jaws of those on exhibit, the concluding bit is a snapping bear trap that punctures a fake arm and shoots stage blood at the audience...
...There's no chance of these people falling into the aisles as the Beatle worshipers did, but at times they seem capable of storming the stage and eating the performers...
...of a nightclub, circa 1941, which is the setting of the show...
...Penn is a very big man, a nonstop talker, bad-mouthing the audience, professional magicians, and fake psychics (he would say all are fakes...
...The morning paper says that Miles Davis died last night...
...I would also prefer Penn & Teller at less length...
...The volatility isn't confined to the concert scenes...
...GERALD WEALES MEDIA THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS MILES DAVIS, R.I.P...
...The team has a nicely ambivalent approach to magic...
...m writing this on September 29, 1991...
...Her excitement is the best indication of the kind of fun-and-games going with Song of Singapore at the Song of Singapore...
...With a show half as extended as Rot in Hell, I could admire Penn's power of verbal obfuscation and Teller's use of silence as a disarming device without being worn down by the essential sameness of the very different numbers...
...But this same rowdiness is destructive...
...And a Procol Harum number played on a church organ between Masses...
...I can't imagine the lively Jimmy sitting still for an answer like that, but it's one way to express a problem that engaged Thomas Mann for 510 turbid pages of his novel, Doctor Faustus, and that has here been breezily dramatized in a movie that is as clear and impudent as a shout in the street...
...The young couple sharing my table clearly did not know that the invading Japanese came down the peninsula on bicycles...
...The ones that made it to the stage seemed to enjoy themselves immensely...
...That one juxtaposition speaks volumes about the coexistence of past centuries within this century of Irish life...
...The real point of The Commitments is found in the rowdy behavior of the young people which grows out of the hectic street life that surrounds them...
...By the time we get back to the boys, the announcement has already been made and the musicians are looking at each other dumbfounded...
...It is put together by a platoon of creators, three of whom (Erik Frandsen, Robert Hipkens, and Michael Garin) are playing in it, in both senses of the verb--acting and performing on musical instruments...
...It threads its way through the night-club show numbers that have a nice forties' feel to them and that are performed by a band that is a great deal more talented than one that might have washed ashore in the supposedly sleazy setting...
...I never figured out whether the attraction in this number--and in the whole show--lay in the possibility of blood or the audience's certainty that Teller was only in illusionary danger...
...the more acts, the better the chance to get into one...
...Teller is a small man with a befuddled look who seldom speaks and who is constantly menaced by the dangerous looking devices in their acts...
...There is fun in their mockery of the portentousness of the standard magician, but I suspect that audiences really want to be baffled and that they like all that old-fashioned nonsense of rabbit-filled top hats, cloaks full of plastic flowers, and unending strings of knotted handkerchiefs...
...As somebody 6nce said about Jerry Lee Lewis, "Anytime he takes the stage, it's a comeback...
...Dublin itself quickens the movie...
...And a little boy leading his horse into a building's elevator because the fired beast can't mount the stairs...
...Many scenes are artfully shaped so as to achieve a comic effect that I would call the Bathetic Sublime...
...A final line about the characters' flying to safety at Pearl Harbor got an uncomplicated laugh from the audience...
...Jazz critics, including, I hope, the immensely gifted Gary Giddins, are going to assess his astonishing career, and his almost unprecedented influence on the course of American music---that's jazz music (of which rock is a part...
...As in: an out-of-work player sees Miles on the street and says, "Hey, Miles, can you get me a gig...
...So disgusted that he finally disowns his own troupe, Jimmy turns to a fellow entrepreneur and asks, "Is everyone in rock 'n' roll an asshole...
...It leads to musicians quitting, rehearsals being disrupted, performances getting unhinged, and, ultimately, the dissolution of the group...
...Not so with my fellow playgoers, I think...
...The plot is a farrago of missing jewels, corrupt colonial police, and a singer who can remember nothing 25 October 1991:615 except the lyrics of her songs...
...Sneers Miles: "Doin' what...
...They applaud the Commitments with fierce joy but they laugh at their mistakes, too, and taunt them...
...On the night I was there, a chubby enthusiast bounced in her chair expectantly, eager to get the plot out of the way so that she could get back to her feet...
...The very first shot of the film shows us an outdoor market in which horses are tethered next to tables stacked with TV sets...
...Members of the cast and the costumed staff lure reluctant customers to the dance floor on occasion, but by the time the show is over the floor fills whenever there is a break in the proceedings...
...What does that mean...
...He was sixty-five when he died, and given the lifestyle he records, with brutal honesty, in his 1989 autobiography, that itself is miraculous...
...Finally, the muck of life can clog the wheels of art...
...The musical numbers in Song of Singapore are both lively and clever and the parody plot is amiably outrageous, but the appeal of the show lies in its setting...
...For instance, when Jimmy, the group's manager-promoter, says he's come up with the name of the band, the musicians obligingly quiet down for the big announcement...
...The laughter and taunts aren't divisible from the joy: they have discovered something that is theirs and they will do with it what they will...
...This is entertainment, plain and simple...
...When we look at these Irish audiences--a woman with a face bloated by poor nutrition and reddened by drink, a little boy so excited by the music that he has to crawl over the amplification equipment--we feel that no matter how much TV they have access to, nothing could awaken these people but a live performance played only for them...
...The performers--in the club, not the show--are a multinational gathering of drifters and losers like those who regularly turned up in South Sea movies of the 1930s and 1940s...
...Their stock-in-trade is to perform familiar routines, exposing the trick of the tricks in the process, but they also do tricks--for instance, a couple of variations on Harry Houdini, whom they admire as a fellow psychic-buster--in which they mystify the audience in the best tradition of stage magic...
...I'm not sure...
...Song of Singapore is the name of an expensively redecorated space on Irving Place...
...So what do I--who never met the man, who never played trumpet (tenor saxophone is what I failed at), and who didn't really much care for the stuff he played for the last fifteen years of his life--what do I have to add to the mourners' chorus...
...If you trust the jazz grapevine, and it's much more reliable than, say, a presidential press conference, he was not very loved, but widely, deeply, feared and--is this a word?----awed...
...The performance scores--but Wilson Pickett doesn't show...
...This comic method, which reached its peak in certain Italian comedies of the fifties and sixties li~ke Big Deal on Madonna Street, consists of setting up big dramatic moments and then instantly deflating them...
...This is not Privates on Parade, in which real bullets stop the musical review...
...I'm only sure that mourn I must, and that aloud...
...In the Richard Lester movie, the Beatles brought a new feeling of freedom and sexual lyricism to middle-class British girls who wailed and wept with delight...
...and of the revuemelodrama that takes place there...
...There are going to be retrospectives and memorials about Miles up the hoo-haw...
...There are allusions to familiar films of the period--Casablanca, for instance--but the show is more generic than specific...
...But the equivalent scenes in the Parker movie, when the Commitments play for free in church halls and youth clubs, are even more poignant because they have a tinge of desperation...
...At the end of the show, the performers move out through the audience as the characters escape Singapore before the Japanese arrive...
...We laughed at them but our laughter was tender...
...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE GETTING INTO THE ACT 'SINGAPORE' & 'ROT IN HELL' he obvious popularity of both Song of Singapore and Penn & Teller Rot in Hell makes one wonder whether or not there are two off-Broadway audiences--one for nostalgic camp and one for aggression comedy--or whether there is just one that wants to get into the act...
...The very destiny of the band is touched by the Bathetic Sublime: the kids live up to their Big Break by giving their best performance for an audience that is supposed to include the American soul singer Wilson Pickett...
...Rot in Hell, a new show apparently full of familiar Penn & Teller material, was the first of the team's productions I have seen in the theater, but I had the feeling that I was surrounded by Penn & Teller groupies of all ages...
...His whispered, monosyllabic cruelties have been legend for two decades...
...Not all of this movie's vibrancy comes from verisimilitude and not all of the filmmaking smacks of documentary...
...But Parker then insouciantly cuts away to another scene before Jimmy can get the name out...
...The comic appeal of Penn & Teller presumably lies in the personae they assume and in the whisper of nastiness that underlies much of the show...
...And anybody who ever knew Miles--he knew a lot of people, and he managed to hurt almost all of them--is going to be able to dine out on anecdotes about the Prince of Darkness (yeah, they really called him that) for years to come...
...I know that I do, although I like my magic in very small doses...
...The Commitments...
...so they took an allusion to that bit of history simply as a joke, which was proper since the fall of Singapore is not to be taken any more seriously here than the melodrama...
...Jazz, for a lot of us, is The Only Music That Matters...
Vol. 118 • October 1991 • No. 18
