There’s always something of a
gamble when the work of an iconic composer gets reimagined by a composer from
another discipline—Sondheim or Schwartz through the filter of jazz, for
example—because the very details that define the composer’s profile often get swapped away for
familiar genre riffs around a melody, and a distillation of the harmonic
structure; rather than getting something new, you get something a little
processed. Far better than Muzak but rarely revelatory.
Exceptions?
The Gershwin piano rolls. Harvey Schmidt’s piano arrangements of popular songs
(you can’t get them commercially, alas; these were private recordings he sent
to friends every Christmas). Lalo Schifrin’s early-career recordings that
featured big band arrangements of classical works. What distinguishes these
treatments from the others I mentioned is that Gershwin, Schmidt and Schifrin
aren’t really functioning as specialist interpreters. All three are
fantastically gifted composers and what they’ve done is to put the musical
source material through the prism of their compositional style. Rather than
merely adapting from one style of music to another, they’ve tacitly signed on
as co-composers. Schifrin’s album New Fantasy transcends classical music as jazz; it’s classical music as Schifrin. Huge
difference.
Young
performer-arranger Kyle Riabko is
really operating in the first realm—that of genre
reinterpreter—with his show What’s It All About?: Bacharach
Reimagned, which has
been extended at the New York Theatre Workshop. But for the first, oh, two-fifths of the show, not quite half, he
manages to pull off the impression of the second. This is due to two factors:
(1) he hasn’t limited himself to a single style of contemporary pop, but has
brought to bear many filters drawn from the vocabulary; (2) Bacharach’s
signature style, a staple of the 60s and 70s, is in its pure form so totally
its own thing that it defined an entire school of pop theatre writing; merging
his melodies and harmonies to the very different styles that evolved after his
most prominent years and split off into a kind of studio/electronic approach
that in some ways seemed the rock equivalent of progressive jazz does indeed
create a bracing sense of novelty: one kind of revolution meeting another. And
here was almost always a sense of theatricality to a Bacharach tune, as
exemplified in his score for Promises, Promises.
And
let’s not discount that Riabko and his fellow singer-musician performers (Daniel
Bailen, Laura Dreyfuss, James Nathan Hopkins, Nathaly Lopez, James Williams and Daniel
Woods) put on a helluva show, under the
direction of Steven Hoggett.
Physical and sound design, choreography and movement, mood, tone, the entire
package, come off with sass and savvy that could easily rival the best and most
memorable music videos you ever saw.
But
beyond that near-half point, the novelty fades, and that’s because tropes of
popular music finally stalled in the 90s. If you discount the anti-melodic,
anti-harmonic aggression of rap and punk and metal—and in this context
one must—there wasn’t really a great distance to travel, along the
progressive route; in large measure, it was merely a refinement of rock styles
that had debuted in a rawer state. And that’s because rock music tends to exist in primary, rhythm-driven colors. A
rock song is about its backbeat and overriding feel. Even in his heyday, Burt
Bacharach’s stuff was classified as MOR (middle of the road, an area between
old-time standards and unequivocal rock) and the pastel shadings of his
emotional and rhythmic range didn’t survive into what followed because it
alchemically couldn’t. To be sure, rock encompasses many styles of
delivery—an infinite number of performers can find ways to make their
respective marks—but compositionally the well simply isn’t that deep: a
primary color backbeat and a pastel shading (being harmonic or rhythmic) are
literally antithetical to each other. And without pastels, the color choices
are fewer. And there aren’t enough of them to accommodate the range of
variation in the Bacharach catalog. And at the point where Riabko runs out of
novel juxtapositions, the show is then primarily an essay in contemporary easy
listening.
And
then it’s really about your stamina, and what may charm you. If you’re happy
just to be in the presence of the youthful troupe—and they are, no
mistake, very persuasive—you may
remain enthusiastic throughout. If you’re more interested in musical
revelation, you may find your interest starting to flag, albeit not to the
point of boredom. But considering how awful the previous, Broadway Bacharach
revue, essentially a theme-exploring vanilla variety show, was (as hooky as
they were one at a time, the last thing you want to do is examine the deeper
meaning of Hal David’s collected
lyrics), What’s it all About?, whose
theme-relation explorations are all about the music, at least takes a noble
risk worth checking out.
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