Quick review: about what you’d expect from a 80’s era “broadway opera” about neurotic modern-day New Yorkers dealing with the complexities of life and romantic relationships.


A guy named [Michael McElroy](http://www.broadwayworld.com/bios/viewstar.cfm?starid=254)
graduated from my high school a year or two before I entered it in mid-eighties. Although my interactions with him were extremely brief and pretty forgetable, I easily learned enough about him to know that he was an extraordinary talent. He was a hero of the theater department, and left a legacy not only of storied performances but of short musical plays that the somewhat cult-like theater ensemble revered for years. As a musician, I was always something of an outsider in the theater scene, but as an excellent actor as well as a musician, Michael was a leader in that scene. Not surprisingly, he seems to have gone on to have a viable career in the New York theater scene. Go Michael!

The reason that I feel like I know this man at all is because I ended up playing a great deal of the music that he wrote on the piano, in particular music for one short play called “Through the Years” that he wrote along with faculty member Vince Cardinal. The practices of the department were very odd, although suited pretty well for my skills. They’d hand me a tape, and say things like “listen to the second song on this tape, we need you to be able to play it by Friday.” Occassionally, someone could produce a piece of paper with some chords written out or maybe even some melody fragments, but by and large, we were working by trying to piece things together by ear.

So it was that I heard tapes of Michael McElroy playing and singing his music. And I worked on “figuring it out”. I’m certainly better than your average bloke at this task, but some of my fellow high school theater musicians were better than I, and I had a particularly tough time with some of “Through the Years”. Most of the musical idioms that I’d learned from playing different styles of music didn’t apply very well. Particularly memorable were the “sus” chords, short for “suspended 4th”, which derives from the idea of using 1, 4, and 5 as a “triad” instead of the normal 1,3,5. The “suspended” idea is that the 4 hasn’t yet found its way to 3, to which it “wants” to go. The sus chords in this music usually didn’t follow the path. They were used just for their sonority. Chord progressions were often unexpected, at least to me. And, typically, the piano parts I was playing involved very rhythmic stuff like playing chords in straight eighth notes for measure after measure.

The reason I bring this up: as years rolled by, I realized this stuff that seemed strange to me was extremely idiomatic for a particular thread of musical theater. It wasn’t just Michael McElroy inventing this stuff, he was participating in a musical culture I knew very little about.

I have no idea whether [*Falsettos*](http://www.indiana.edu/~thtr/productions/2005/Falsettos/index.html) was groundbreaking in the establishment of this new idiom, or whether the idiom was already well established by then and its composer, William Finn, was just a rank and file representative of the style by the time he wrote it. But, there is no doubt that it is an example of the style I’m thinking of. Being as this play was set in the then present-day 1980s, this really took me back, since the pianist was playing in much the style I played for theater in the 1980s, the actors were singing in a similar style, and they were talking about a lot of issues (homosexuality, AIDS (then an extremely mysterious new phenomenon), psychiatry, relationships) that I was thinking about for the first time right around then.

All that is interesting, but unfortunately, the play itself wasn’t all that effective. I’m enough of a cheeser that I understand why musical theater is so popular. At its cheesey best, when a main character breaks out in song, I can definitely feel like they are by-passing my normal intellectual guard and making me either smile or mourn or whatever with them. Furthermore, the songs are frequently very well-crafted and catchy, which of course is why they’ve become such an important fountain of material for jazz musicians.

This music pretty much never had much emotional impact on me. In fact, instead of making me feel a sense of connection with the characters, I felt like it made me feel more distant from them… Having them sing everything instead of say it made me feel more like they were reminiscing… as if, instead of living their life with them, I was watching a photo-montage of their lives assembled at a reunion they were having.

Whatever the degree of the music’s impact on this, it is a good description of how I felt. The characters reminded me a lot of real people in real situations, but I didn’t feel like I was getting a good sense of what life in their shoes actually felt like.

In general the performance was fine, although voices sometimes didn’t blend very well together. Some aspects of the performance were quite outstanding, though: Amy Linden did an excellent job bringing to life “I’m breaking down”, which was definitely the musical highlight of the night for me; My “I kept forgetting s/he was an actor and not the actual character” award goes without contest to Alex Peurye-Hissong, in his portrayal of an adolescent boy trying to deal with his parents’ mixed-up lives; and my hat definitely goes off to Robert Gehrenbeck, the co-music director and presumably the pianist that provided the sole instrumental accompaniment to all that singing. I’ve been extremely disappointed with many of the instrumental performances I’ve seen backing up productions at IU’s theaters, but this pianist did a superb job, playing almost nonstop for 2.5 hours in a wide variety of styles. Nice work. And hopefully he’s avoiding repetitive motion disorders as he pounds out those sus-chords in straight eighth notes.