The Banger's Flopera: Maybe Michael John LaChiusa Was Right

Earlier this week I sat in a theatre listening to the words and music of Cole Porter. Tonight I sat in a theatre listening to this. A few minutes later I was treated to this. And before the evening was over they made me listen to some of this.

In a controversial article published in this August's edition of Opera News, composer/lyricist Michael John LaChiusa stated, "The American Musical is dead."

I'm beginning to see his point.

Some may say I just didn't understand composer John Gideon and bookwriter/lyricist Kirk Wood Bromly's updating of John Gay's 18th Century classic, The Beggar's Opera, re-titled The Banger's Flopera: A Musical Perversion, featuring a loud rock score sung by a cast of "gangstaz, pornstaz and popstaz." Well, they'd be right. There's a lot of the show I didn't understand. But I bet I'm not alone. In fact, I will give a dollar to the first person who scrolls down to the bottom of this review and posts a comment saying they attended a performance of The Banger's Flopera and understood every word sung to even one song in the show. I mean it. Not even a whole song. Fifty percent. The first person who can honestly post a comment saying they saw the show and understood even half the lyric of any song gets a dollar from me.

I'll give a dollar to the first person who can honestly say they understood even two words from the song, "Who Made Kids These Days?" That includes words used in the title.

And I'll give two dollars to director Ben Yalom if he'll just ask his musicians to turn the volume down a few notches and tell the actors to stop screaming their songs and their lines.

You want to do subversive, experimental theatre? Great! I will be one of your biggest supporters. You want to explore new visions of musical theatre? I will happily disregard minor flaws and encourage my readers to support interesting efforts. But for the love of Lorenz Hart, will somebody please see to it that a person sitting in the second row of a tiny theatre can hear the words clearly?

Perhaps my favorite part of the show came when one actor growled out the line, "Today's audience is so (something unintelligible) they'll take anything (more growling)" and then did a take to the audience to get a reaction. Of course there was no reaction to what was probably some kind of commentary on commercial theatre because the people he was talking about couldn't understand what the devil he was saying.

Not that the times you could understand the words were exactly moments to be cherished. The Inverse Theater, who produced this musical, claims on their web site that their mission is "to bring active poetry and poetic acting back to theatre." At the beginning of Act II a character named "The Fuck God" stuck a flash light in my face and leaned into me singing of the way he was going to fuck me. I saved him the trouble and did it to myself by watching the rest of the show.

The company also states they do "theater that goes against consumer grain by being intelligent, multifarious and embodied." Ya know, that's exactly what I was thinking during the scene where the homeless guy gets dry-humped by the porn star while being executed in an electric chair. Oh darn, I just gave away the ending. Don't worry, it had nothing to do with the plot anyway.

You have to admire a company that attacks "a mainstream media that caters to the lowest common denominator of consumers" and boasts that "Every Inverse play is a diverse and rich event full of poetry." Listening to the abuse-loving underage ingenue (If you love rape jokes, this is the show for you!) sing how "gangstaz make my girl goo gush" had me thinking how Stephen Sondheim might want to make an addition to his famous list of songs he wish he wrote. Also a diverse and rich event full of poetry was the scene where she went to the bathroom, stating she wouldn't leave until she could smell that morning's breakfast burrito, pulled down her panties and sang a song while sitting on the toilet. You gotta love a show gutsy enough to steal a bit that was cut after the first preview of the legendary Broadway flop, Bring Back Birdie.

There is nothing so dull as someone trying really hard to shock you.

The actors are pretty good, by the way. When they're not screaming, I mean. The girl goo gushing April Vidal and her abusive boyfriend Joe Pindelski (at one point he hits her and you'd swear she's about to say it felt like a kiss) are both strong singers and comic actors. It would be nice if they had something funny to say on occasion. Another actress is listed in the program as being named Saaarah@gmail.com. But I hear that's just a stage name. Her real name is Saaarah@yahoo.com, but there was already one of them in the union.