Would You Take the Pill? Kevin Kling and Storytelling Arts of Indiana

Some would say storyteller Kevin Kling’s been given a hard lot in life. He was born with only four fingers on his left hand, and then later lost the use of his right arm in a motorcycle accident. As part of a theatrical company for people with disabilities–everything from Down syndrome to aphasia to MS–he was asked if he could take a pill that would remove his infirmities, would he? At that time, Kevin was the only one to answer yes.

Later, however, after an unforgettable moment of singing with his company and two world-famous opera singers in the Australian Outback, Kevin changed his answer. For all the pain he’d gone through, all the inconvenience, all the being othered, he wouldn’t take that pill if it meant he had to give up that one sublime moment.

At its core, Kevin’s performance is about who you are and where you come from. That includes everything from his Minnesotan heritage to his hatred of fairy tales (though he tells a hysterical rendition of Grimm’s “12 Princesses” which may be better than the original) to frank and candid discussion of his disability. All of these things tie together to make him who he is, and you can’t remove any of it, even the less than ideal parts of it, without winding up with a completely different person.

Kevin is a truly funny storyteller. His stories bounce from one another in a kind of schizoid stream-of-consciousness that somehow works. For the record, he may also be the fastest-talking Minnesotan known to man. His act is far ranging, discussing everything from taking his Dutch cousin to the Minnesota State Fair (Protip: Corn dogs freeze really well) to a memorable trip where Kevin performs a banned play in communist Czechoslovakia. As it turns out though, the play was banned by the Americans, not the communists.

“You can go anywhere you want, as long as you remember where you came from,” Kevin’s gros papa (grandfather) told him. And that’s really what the show is about. Where you came from isn’t just a place, it’s a state of mind, a state of physicality, a state of limitations and ways of shattering them. Funny and thoughtful in equal measures, Kevin richly deserved his standing ovation and was the perfect way to close out a stellar season of Storytelling Arts.

Thank you to all the talented performers this year. Hope to see some of you next season, which kicks off in September with Irish music and storytelling. In the meantime, Storytelling Arts will still be active in the community, including sponsoring a stage at the Indy Fringe Festival in August.

My ticket was provided free of charge by Storytelling Arts of Indiana. I was asked to write about the event but was not compensated and the opinions are only my own.

American Idiot: Part Performance Art, Part Music Video, All Loud

The original American Idiot album was written by alt band Green Day in 2004. Ubiquitous songs like “Holiday,” “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and the eponymous “American Idiot” formed a kind of backdrop to my junior and senior years of high school. I never bought the album, but the songs were always there, simmering below the surface and echoing internal and external chaos. In a way, that’s how the songs play into the stage version of American Idiot. Yes, characters sing, but often the heavy lifting of a song is carried by the chorus or by a background character. The songs express the character’s emotions without necessarily coming from the character themselves. In essence, it turns the musical into one big music video–which is not necessarily a bad thing.

The show takes another step away from musicals with its heavy integration of video and art. The set is truly amazing: grungy dark metal, anarchy symbols, a dirty bathroom and rolling metal platforms. But there are also dozens of flat-panel TVs that flash scenes from the news, pop culture, abstract patterns, colors and phrases (seriously: I wouldn’t attend if you’re prone to seizures). The use felt similar to modern art pieces until it almost began to cross the line into performance art. Sometimes this goes a bit too far, as when an aerial ballet begins with a woman in a sparkly blue burka descending  from the ceiling, only to strip to reveal a genie outfit and dance through the air with a recently injured soldier, but usually the imagery enhances the show, pushing the very limits of what we think of as musical theater.

American Idiot takes the work RENT started with rock operas and pushes it one step further. There is very little dialogue–this review will probably be longer than all the spoken dialogue in the show–and unlike RENT, there are no arias or recitatives. It’s all songs, many of them familiar radio singles. There is a story, about three loser friends who seek their fortunes, one in the big city where he gets sucked into drugs, one into the army where he loses his leg, and another is forced to remain behind with his girlfriend and their new baby, but it’s not really about specific people. Rather, it’s about that weird time known as the early 2000s, a time we can’t even come up with a good name for.

Remember freedom fries? The start of the Iraq War? The nagging fear that still never quite went away that there could be another September 11 any day? The roller coaster stock market, the constant uncertainty in almost every aspect of life? But wrapped up inside that uncertainty, we were supposed to have an emotional security. After all, we were born atop Maslow’s Hierarchy. We never wanted for creature comforts, for love, for self esteem. All these things were piled on top of us like down comforters.

So dammit, why weren’t we happy? Why does the main character resent his mom because she lent him bus fare to get to the city? Why couldn’t we settle own into the good, boring jobs and the good, boring lives that were planned for us? The show doesn’t really offer any answers, though our characters do find that home is a lot better than they thought.

The music is performed ably by a large, energetic and very young cast. The leads sound almost freakishly similar to Green Day, but the brassy voices of the ladies steal quite a few numbers. The dancing is aggressive, sloppy, apathetic and perfect. And above all, this show is loud, with cacophonous accompaniment from an onstage band. My feet were vibrating; my ears are still ringing. The moments of silence in the show were truly deafening, and many times the audience seemed to forget to clap or even breathe as we were plunged from noise into stillness.

Be warned: This is not a show for everyone. Many people will dislike this show intensely. I saw a few people walk out.  But it’s a show that sticks with you, a show that reminds me of being young and confused and yeah, an idiot. Of not knowing where I was going or what I wanted or what mattered. And just a little bit, of coming home. I’m glad I saw it.

If you’re a Millennial  you’re interested in recapturing that feeling or you want to see some pretty cutting edge theater with a retro (can we consider the 2000s retro yet? Dear God, I’m old), check out American Idiot. It’s playing at Clowes Memorial Hall through April 7. Tickets start at $25, which is a steal. The show is in one act and clocks in at a brisk 1 hour 45 minutes and is completely inappropriate for children in every conceivable way.

My tickets were provided courtesy of Broadway Across America Indianapolis. I was asked to tweet about my experiences and was not required to blog about the show. All opinions are my own. 

By the Power You Are Healed: Sister Act

For the past two days, I’ve been fighting a cold that’s left my head afog and my nose asnot. I strongly considered ditching not just Sister Act, but this whole day. I wanted to curl under the covers with a box of Kleenex and try it all again tomorrow.

But I couldn’t. There was too much to do, and I couldn’t miss out on an evening of theater, no matter how sneezy I might be. So I drug myself out of bed, bumbled through work and met up with dear friends for Sister Act at the Old National Centre. I’m so glad I did. This morning while I moped under my covers, I forgot that two of the best treatments for sickness of the body or of the soul are music and laughter. Sister Act delivers both in spades.

For those of you who only have misty memories of the 1992 source movie starring Whoopi Goldberg, that’s okay. The plot is simple: Wannabe lounge singer Deloris witnesses her gangster boyfriend capping a henchman in a back alleyway. As luck would have it, she has to enter an unconventional witness protection program in a convent. As you do. There, she runs smack into a by-the-book Mother Superior and a ragtag group of nuns who couldn’t sing “alleluia” if their lives depended on it. Using sass and brass, Delores transforms them into a choir with the heart, soul and chops to sing for the pope himself.

Yeah, it’s flimsy and silly. This is not a deeply cerebral musical. Embrace that. It is surprisingly clever. There were a few obscure religious jokes that had me rolling in the aisles. Come on, what other musical has a joke about Barabas? Not even Jesus Christ, Superstar. I can’t recall ever laughing quite so hard at a musical, from the silly seduction of a group of thugs to the antics of the nuns, it’s a good-hearted and thoroughly fluffy musical. I love it for that. Mother Superior (Hollis Resnik) displays perfect comedic timing and a whip-smart weariness that I adored.

As for the music, it truly shines during group numbers. Any time you have a big group of people on stage, the results will be stunning, and the nuns are no exception here. Their harmonies are tight, their habits are sparkly and their dance moves are pure ’70s cheese. “Take Me to Heaven,” the first rousing number the nuns sing together, really is stirring, as is the booming encore.

Sister Act also features what may be my favorite ever prop in a musical: a giant statue of the Virgin Mary. It starts off as a shrouded, almost forgotten thing, but eventually becomes a bedazzled extravaganza of wonderfulness.

Great music and laughter aren’t a cure for illness; my nose is starting to drip again and the clouds are creeping back into my head. But for a couple of hours, I was able to laugh away my illness and spend some time being transported away from my cares with a show that is far, far more fun than I ever expected. Go see Sister Act. Trust me on this one.

Sister Act is at the Old National Centre February 26-March 3. Tickets start at $39. My tickets were provided courtesy of Broadway Across America Indianapolis. I was asked to tweet my impressions of the show but was not obligated to write this blog post or endorse the show in any way. Opinions are my own. 

Tight Harmonies, Tight Stories in Jersey Boys

I first saw Jersey Boys when it came to Indy a few years ago. When people asked me about it, I would answer that it was a good show–for a jukebox musical. This sub-genre of musicals relies on the work of a pop artist or a particular era of music rather than original songs. For many jukebox musicals, that means hanging the songs onto a flimsily constructed story, as in Mama Mia! or Rock of Ages. However in Jersey Boys, the music of the Four Seasons is used to tell the story of the Four Seasons. And that makes all the difference.

After seeing Jersey Boys again tonight, I can tell you that it isn’t just good for a jukebox musical. It’s an excellent musical of any stripe and one of the best touring productions I’ve seen in a good long while.

The music is great, sung and played by freakishly talented musicians, though there are no surprises. It’s the classic music of the Four Seasons, including “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” and my personal favorite, “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night).” What this musical excels at is putting that tried-and-true music into an emotional context that gives them tremendous resonance. When “Walk Like a Man” is reprised at the end of the first act, it’s transformed from an anthem of spurned boys into a recrimination against a group member who has shirked his responsibility. When Frankie sings “Bye Bye Baby,” it’s sung both to his wayward daughter as well as to his wayward group, which is falling apart in front of his eyes. Though many of the lyrics are bubblegum, the show builds a sturdy emotional framework around them that makes them greater than they are.

The structure of the show is tight as a drum. The first act is a breathless whirlwind, with almost continual music. The second act has more space to breathe and consider the emotional blowback from the group’s meteoric rise to fame. The narration is divided into four–what else?–seasons, each narrated by a member of the group. It’s a fun study in unreliable narrators, since none of the group member’s stories are to be entirely believed.

The seasons give each cast member a chance to shine with their acting, which is a rare treat in a musical. John Gardiner as Tommy DeVito is all bluster, swagger, and heart; Michael Lomenda as Nick Massi is a stoic presence for much of the show before busting out some serious comedic chops. Nick Cosgrove’s Frankie Valli has the beautiful bell-like voice and nasal falsetto needed for the role and brings what life he can to a role that’s not terribly developed outside of that voice.

However, the surprise of the night was Tommaso Antico as Bob Gaudio. You always groan a little when you see an understudy is subbing in; even though you know they’re great, part of you can’t help but feel you’re getting the B team. But Antico brought a real sensitivity and plain old likability to wunderkind writer Gaudio. It’s a role that can easily come off as know-it-allish or unpleasant, but Antico kept an innocence and a sly wit about him. Sure, he strained a bit on his big solo in “December, 1963,” but Bob emerged as my favorite of the group, thanks to Antico’s character work.

The staging is crisp, minimal, and clever, enhanced by video panels with comic book-like images and live footage of the group as they sing in profile to the audience. The set is mostly a chain link fence and a staircase, never letting us fully forget that at heart, these are boys from the wrong side of the tracks. They’re boys who never should have made it anywhere except jail, but by pulling together and always, always staying true to each other (even when maybe they shouldn’t have), they found a way to thrive. More or less.

Jersey Boys can proudly hold its head up as a great musical in its own right, without any qualifiers or limitations. It’s fast-paced, funny, thoughtful, with fun music sung by talented people. Even if you’re not familiar with the Four Seasons, you’ll find a lot to love in Jersey Boys. It’s in Indianapolis through January 20 at the Murat Theatre at the Old National Centre.

My tickets were provided courtesy of Broadway Across America Indianapolis. I was asked to tweet about my experiences, but the opinions are my own. I was not asked to write this blog and was not compensated in any other way. 

Connective Tissue: Christmas in the Trenches

Sometimes, it comes down to expectations.

When I heard that John McCutcheon’s Storytelling Arts performance was titled Christmas in the Trenches, I expected that I would see a show that focused on stories and songs tied primarily to the holiday season. Sure, McCutcheon’s bio told me he was an accomplished folk and children’s songwriter, but I thought the bulk of the show would be focused on stories and Yuletide.

What we got was a general concert with a few stories sprinkled in. In the almost three hour show, there were three songs about Christmas, including Woody Guthrie’s “Nineteen Thirteen Massacre” which features the murder of 73 children at the hands of copper company thugs.

Merry Christmas?

To be fair, McCutcheon is both an accomplished musician and a strong storyteller. Some of the best moments of the show came from purely instrumental numbers, like his whale watching-inspired “Leviathan” or a sprightly medley of Virginia fiddle tunes. He bounced between the piano, two guitars, a fiddle, an auto harp, a hammered dulcimer and a jaw harp. If, like me, you aren’t familiar with the jaw harp, imagine that little spring that stops your door from banging against the wall. That sproing sound is the jaw harp. Let’s say it’s interesting in small doses.

Stories are peppered throughout, some loosely held together with a framework about a box of old audio recordings, but all are too short to gain much traction. I would have loved to have heard more about McCutcheon’s lunch with Frank Buckles, the oldest World War I veteran, but we quickly skipped over much of that fascinating conversation. A raucous encore poem extolling the virtue of hot Krispy Kreme donuts brought the house down, but was divorced from any other piece in the show both in style and subject.

Many of the songs are stories in and of themselves, ranging from Woody Guthrie protest songs to numbers about baseball and the eponymous “Christmas in the Trenches,” which tells of a famous cease-fire between German and British soldiers during World War I.  At times, I suffered tonal whiplash between songs, like when we hopped directly from a scathing political satire about the bank bailouts to a sensitive ode McCutcheon’s father that reminded me of “Cat’s in the Cradle.”

McCutcheon is a popular artist; I met one gentleman who drove up from Bloomington just for the show. But for me, the lack of transitions or connective tissue meant that no story really shone. Great stories need beginnings, middles and ends. Even if a show is made up of short vignettes rather than one long-form story, there needs to be some through line that connects them all. Without that, it’s hard to connect.

Next up for the Storytelling Arts series is Hello Ricky Nelson, Goodbye Heart by Barbara McBride-Smith on Saturday, January 19 at 7:30 p.m. at the Indiana History Center. Tickets are $20 in advance or $25 at the door.

My tickets were provided courtesy of Storytelling Arts of Indiana. I was in no way obligated to write about the event and received no compensation. 

Billy Elliot: Let the Boy Dance!

There is a moment in Billy Elliot when 11-year-old Billy dances with the man he could become. There are a lot of ifs to get through before he can become that man. If his father lets him audition for the Royal Ballet. If he can somehow scrape together the money to get to London for the audition. If he can pass the audition and somehow make it through years of intensive training. There are so many insurmountable ifs. But in that moment, set to the booming strains of Swan Lake, none of the ifs matter. There’s just a boy with a dream, and he’s flying.

That’s the gist of the musical. A boy with a dream. Simple, as most good musicals are. If you’re unfamiliar with the 2000 film that inspired the stage production, as I was, Billy Elliot tells the story of an eleven-year-old boy in the 1980s. His northern English village has been afflicted by Margaret Thatcher’s anti-mining policies, and the populace is on strike. I’ll confess I didn’t really understand this plot, since I know almost nothing about mining, striking or Margaret Thatcher, but it really just serves as a backdrop for Billy, the boy who stumbles out of a boxing class and into a ballet class. Or “balley,” as the cast calls it. From there, it’s all about a dream and impossible odds and (spoiler!) ultimate success.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Billy Elliot’s strongest scenes come when there’s dancing. The first time Billy learns, on wobbling legs, to turn a pirouette. The raucous babble of his little-girl dance classmates. The furious dance when Billy’s dream seems crushed, set against a blood-red background and clashing miners and policemen. And of course, that gorgeous dance with Billy and himself, complete with one of the most lovely and touching aerial sequences I’ve ever seen. You may not leave the show humming the music, but the dance sequences are indelible.

The stage design is clever and innovative, with characters interacting directly with set pieces as they shuffle on and off stage. The lighting is superb. You may not pay much attention to lighting, but it’s one of the most critical aspects of any show. Here, shadows are used to tremendous effect, especially when Billy seems to dance with his own shadowy counterpart in a scene that reminded me of Peter Pan. Late in the show, miner’s headlamps form a dramatic backdrop for a song of solidarity and, in many ways, resignation.

The cast is talented and so, so young. Our Billy, Noah Parets, is just 13. 13! Mind boggling. Keep in mind the role of Billy rotates, so you may have a completely different experience.

There’s also an inflatable Margaret Thatcher. Maggie puppets, too. Make of that what you will.

Make sure you aren’t fooled by a false curtain call at the end; a few people left the theater and missed what’s one of the best actual curtain calls I’ve seen, complete with some sharp tap dancing by the entire cast.

The show is mostly family friendly, and there were certainly plenty of kids in the audience which is wonderful to see, but be warned: the language is shockingly salty. Most of it will probably whiz right by kids since it’s dropped so casually into speech, but be forewarned.

Billy Elliot is a beautiful musical to look at, acted with passion and aplomb and staged with attention to detail and beauty. It’s in Indy through November 18 at the Old National Centre, which I insist on calling the Murat like a crotchety old person. Tickets start at $39, including ticket handling charges. Click here to buy tickets.

My tickets were provided courtesy of Broadway Across America Indianapolis. I was not obligated to write about the show and received no additional compensation. All opinions are my own. 

Gathering Coal for the Lord: The Circle Goes On

There are some stories that sweep through the ages. Clare Murpy told these kinds of stories, timeless tales of heroism and archetypes and the hero’s journey and epicness. Then there are stories that trickle down through generations, loved and told and retold until they’re soft and yellowed around the edges like an old family photograph. They aren’t the kind of stories that change who we are–they’re stories that give form and shape to who we are now, as people, as Hoosiers, as a family. These are the kinds of stories Lou Ann Homan told in the premiere of her new storytelling piece, “Gathering Coal for the Lord” as part of Storytelling Arts of Indiana’s Frank Basile Emerging Stories Fellowship.

Lou Ann told the story of three generations of her family–her grandparents, her father, and to a lesser extent, herself–set against the backdrop of the Great Depression. But in a way, it’s more than the story of her family; they’re the stories of every family.

Before the show, Lou Ann lined the stage with family photos and urged us all to come and look. When she began her set, she noted that as she listened to people as they perused the faded and cracked images, there was one common refrain: that’s my family. That could be my family. We all have the same photos of unsmiling ancestors on their wedding day, of masses of people crammed into a Model-T or posing with a baby swallowed by a lacy dress. We’ve all got that crazy grandpa who slept with a shotgun beside his bed, that uncle who ran shine during the Depression, or that grandmother who built bombs during the War but never talked about it after.

This is the story of all families, of all Hoosiers, of anyone who ever lived through hard times. We hear stories of heartbreak and deprivation, of when parents who could not feed their child took them to a farm and didn’t return for three years. We hear how that family was finally reunited and scraped together a living selling horseradish sauce and rosebud salve in a little red wagon in the streets of Fort Wayne. We hear how they spent all their money to buy cornmeal, beans, and coffee, enough food to cobble together a meal for the sad-eyed men at a weekly mission.

Their son, Ralph, played the piano at those missions. He’d learned to play when he’d lived on that farm. The piano he played on was missing keys, but that was all right. He learned to play around them. And if that isn’t a metaphor for living in any era, I don’t know what is. Ralph played that piano for those men, who never came up to the altar to find Jesus. Not one. They ate their beans and cornbread, listened to that boy play, and left, unsaved.

Years later, Ralph asked his father what he’d been doing there. Why did they sacrifice so much to hold those missions for those men when it never accomplished anything? “They didn’t need to come to the altar,” he said. “The altar came to them. The altar was hope, and it was enough.”

Lou Ann’s telling is simple and unaffected, the kind of storytelling that happens by happenstance when families get together. At the end of the performance, she brought her grandson on stage. “The circle goes on,” she said as the boy picked out “Amazing Grace” on a piano which did have all the keys. And if all the notes weren’t quite right, I don’t think anyone minded.

One of my biggest regrets is that didn’t gather stories from my father’s family when I had the chance. That piece of my history is forever gone, save for a few scraps of memories we have written down. My grandfather always wanted to tell those stories, but we weren’t ready to listen. And now we can’t. Not this side of heaven, anyway. So even if you couldn’t make it for Lou Ann’s performance, carry her message with you. Ask your family for their history; gather the stories together like pieces of coal flung from a passing freight train, picked up and saved to heat a struggling mission.

Let those stories keep your circle unbroken.

My tickets were provided courtesy of Storytelling Arts of Indiana. I was in no way obligated to write about the event and received no compensation. 

Time and Place: Ghost Stories at Crown Hill Cemetery

Twilight reigned all day; the sun never showed its face. Day slid into night in a graceful gesture that tinged the sky with dusty pink and outlined the monuments all around us in sober black. Trees whispered in the faint breeze, jostling for position. Stately gravestones, monolithic tombs, and lithe angels all seemed to lean in to hear the stories spun on the crisp October evening.

There really could be no better setting for Storytelling Arts of Indiana’s annual Ghost Stories program than Crown Hill Cemetery. The cemetery itself is one of Indianapolis’ great treasures, holding the earthly remains of some of our city’s most distinguished sons and daughters, while also being a beautiful resting place for many of us normal folk. Though we were there at night for the performance and were surrounded by more than 200,000 of the dearly departed, it’s not a place of fear. Some places are saturated with psychic terror, impressions of people who have left this world in fear. But even in the dark and the chill, Crown Hill remains a place of immense peace. The dead sleep well there.

Not that we didn’t try to wake them up a bit with some raucous stories. Seven Hoosier storytellers came from as far away as Kendallville and Bloomington for the annual event, held at Crown Hill for the first time. The very best of the storytellers remembered to keep their tales rooted in our specific time and our specific place.

That’s one of the advantages to storytelling, after all. Movies are shown in movie theaters, by and large; whether you watch a film in Cincinnati or Shanghai, the experience is roughly the same. While it’s fun to see Julius Caesar in the theater on the Ides of March, it doesn’t really add a new dimension to the story besides a fun serendipity  But with storytelling, location and time can profoundly impact the experience. This same program wouldn’t have the same effect delivered on a sultry July evening; nor would it mean the same thing if it were held at Storytelling Arts’ usual venue at the Indiana History Center. No, by having the event in October, when the veil between the worlds is thin and translucent and in a graveyard filled with the beloved dead, we place these stories into a unique and fixed context.

The evening began with a recounting of Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley’s famous “Little Orphan Annie” by West Lafayette storyteller Sheri Johnson. The poem itself is not frightening, except perhaps to very small children–it’s a standard cautionary tale to be good, or “the goblins will get you if you don’t watch out,” as we all chanted together. But when you think that Riley is buried in the very ground upon which we sat, the experience shifted from one in which the long-dead poet became an active participant in the proceedings.

Likewise, Bob Sander’s tale of terror in an Irish cemetery was a world away from us, but it made me look twice at the gravestones as I walked back to my car. The lilting of his voice and the subtle yet well-performed brogue he adopted gave some of the evening’s biggest chills with a classic tale of unquiet dead and feisty Irish lasses. His vividly painted story almost had us smelling the loamy scent of a freshly turned grave.

Indianapolis storyteller Celestine Bloomfield made use of the time of year for effect rather than the location. Her story of horror in a pumpkin patch played on familiar tropes, reminding us all of common October memories: picking out pumpkins on a clear autumn day, the smell of decaying leaves that combines life and death in a single whiff, the excitement of carving into a pumpkin for the first time and the pain of being attacked by an evil pumpkin gremlin. We’ve all been there.

Finally, the last performer of the evening, Lou Ann Homan from Angola, chose to ignore the time, ignore the place, and still come up with the scariest performance of the evening. Even as she chose not to set her story in a graveyard and to have no reference to the time of the year, she instead chose to go straight for fear with her fantastic interpretation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Telltale Heart.” She recreated the hideous heartbeat, made us believe the narrator was mad yet desperately needed to believe in her own sanity. She tapped into the emotion we all wanted to feel that night, that terror that races through your veins but reminds you you’re alive.

If there was one disappointment in the evening, it’s that there weren’t more true ghost stories. Only two of the the seven stories featured ghosts at all, and only Sander’s tale featured them prominently. I would have loved to see more focus on spirits than monsters and murderers. But all in all, it was a beautiful evening, a moment frozen in time and enhanced by the setting and the October night.

Next up for Storytelling Arts? You can catch my favorite performer of the evening, Lou Ann Homan, perform in the Frank Basile Emerging Stories presentation telling tales of Depression-era Indiana on November 3 at the Indiana History Center. Tickets are $10 in advance and $15 at the door.

My tickets were provided courtesy of Storytelling Arts of Indiana. I was in no way obligated to write about the event and received no compensation. 

Looper: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

I have a draft post sitting here on this blog. I wrote it a couple weeks ago, but never really edited to a point I was happy with, so it languished. It was a post about how depressingly predictable Hollywood has become, how frustrated I was that I couldn’t find anything worth seeing in theaters because it was an unending sea of reboots and re-releases, of sequels and prequels. I hadn’t seen a movie in theaters since July, which is unusual for me, but there was simply nothing worth the money.

Until Looper. I didn’t know a whole lot about this sci fi flick, only that it had something to do with assassins,  time travel, and that apparently Joseph Gordon Levitt grows up to look like Bruce Willis, which I considered unfortunate. But I heard rumblings that this was something special, that this was clever and new. Those rumblings were correct. Looper is not a perfect movie, but it’s perhaps one of the most interesting and unique films I’ve ever seen. From the script to the direction to the look of the movie, it was a movie experience that was visceral and thoughtful, that was action-packed and deeply character focused. It was a movie that proved how great Hollywood can be when it stops trying to reinvent the wheel and lets its beautiful imagination run wild.

Don’t believe me? Okay. It’s a sci fi movie, set in the future. In Kansas. IN KANSAS. Large swaths of the movie take place in cornfields and cane fields. We aren’t talking the orange and blue and gray you so often see in futuristic films–we’re talking browns and dirt and weary scenes that looks like the sun beat away all the color in the whole wide world. Looper’s future isn’t one of chrome and steel; it’s a future of desperation and hardship that’s both alien and frighteningly real. The tiny details that build a world are strong here, from the steampunkish blunderbusses and gats to the drugs you take by dripping onto your eyeball. It’s all rich and full without hammering you over the head.

It’s also a story about time travel without actually being about time travel at all. How does time travel work? Don’t know, don’t care. In the future (the film is split between 2044 and 2074), they have time travel. That’s all we know and all we need to know. I love that we don’t get into technobabble about how it works. It just does. The rules are simple, since it’s a linear sort of time travel–no alternate universes here. Just one timeline that loops endlessly back on itself in a way that’s meditative and terrifying. In one indelible scene, what happens in the present has immediate and terrifying effects on a character in the future. The scene, which I won’t spoil, is one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen in a movie theater.

But even more than that, even outside of the vibrant sci fi world they’ve built, this is a story about, well, loops. It’s about cycles of violence, and how a single spark of hatred can set off a firestorm that lasts for generations. It’s about how our actions now, even the smallest thing, reverberates forever down the timeline. In a way, it’s even about how our future actions, our future possibilities, influence us right here and now, for better and for worse. And when you strip everything away, it’s about personal responsibility, and how we build futures, for better or worse.

If you’re as tired as I am of retreads, go see Looper. If we want Hollywood to make more of these kinds of movies, we have to reward creativity now. We can’t wait until a movie hits Netflix or Redbox–that doesn’t send a message about what we want. If we want original content, we have to break our own loop of recycle pablum and demand that Hollywood stretch itself, that it stops covering the same ground endlessly and looks for fresh voices and original thoughts. Hollywood is capable of greatness. Such greatness. But when we’re content with mediocre and mindless fare, we don’t force them to live up to their full potential. And we all lose.

Love the Skies I’m Under: Babel Album Review

Art only has meaning when we give it. On its own, art of any kind is a blank and inanimate object. But when it smacks up against our lives, when we overlay our own experiences and emotions and connotations, that’s when art stops being a thing and becomes a something. It becomes something that comforts us, commiserates with us, becomes a friend during our long dark nights and our endless sunny days.

Sometimes, you find an artist who, in that one perfect moment, is walking exactly the same road you are. Their music is the perfect mirror for where you are right now. That’s how I felt when I first discovered Mumford & Sons’ debut album Sigh No More.

It was strange to hear this soulful, bluegrass-inspired music coming from a group of Brits, but it worked. It emulated the music I grew up with and loved more than anything, the folk protest music of the ’60s and ’70s–beautiful acoustic instrumentals, tight vocal harmonies, lyrics that were at once cheesy and impenetrable. But all that was coupled with this intense, masculine rage. This wasn’t a whiny rock angst; this was full-throated, brutal anger directed not at the world, but at oneself. But underneath it all, was this hope that it could get better. Even if you’ve “fucked it up this time,” there was always a kernel of hope that the stone could be rolled away, that there was hope. The group’s unending search for home, for the moment when the stone is rolled away and you realize you are not alone in this–yes. We were walking the same road.

When I heard that Babel was coming out, only a few months after I started my full-on love affair with the band, I was stoked. My excitement only grew when I heard the first single, the triumphant “I Will Wait.” This is a song that thunders in your ears, with the band’s traditional guitar and banjo but also with an unexpected and fun brass section. You can’t help but smile at the pure joy pumping through every line. It’s bombastic, it’s loud, it’s tight both lyrically and vocally. It still embraced the struggle of life, but it was proof that no matter how hard things are, we can get through it together. I counted the days for the full album.

Maybe my expectations were too high when the album finally came out. It’s not that I don’t love Babel. But some of those rough edges I so loved in Sigh No More have been smoothed out. It’s a more mature album, no doubt about it. Many of the songs are more restrained, which is good and bad. The content has moved from an intense self-focus to an outward focus. It’s like the band has moved up Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs: they’ve achieved their own self-actualization, so now they can focus on “waiting” for others, on working to banish “the ghosts that we knew.” But with that self-confidence, the album sacrifices some of that melancholic beauty and fierce anger, some of that questioning and searching.

Musically, this doesn’t push the boundaries of what the band started in Sigh No More. Sure, they added brass sections and an increased emphasis on percussion in some songs, but the songs become almost formulaic. Listen to almost any song, and you’ll hear the same pattern: Start quiet, explode into bombastic ecstasy, decrescendo to a quiet middle section, explode again (or the reverse, with a loud start, as in “I Will Wait,” but more typically, this pattern). Over and over again, like an hourglass. It’s a good pattern, keeping the listener on their toes, but what is unexpected in a song or two becomes dull after the fifth such song.

Don’t get me wrong, there are high notes on this album. ”I Will Wait” remains my favorite track by a country mile, but then again, I’ve had more time to fall in love with it, to sing it in my car at the top of my lungs. I tied it to that anticipation of the album, and after all, isn’t seeing the shiny presents under the tree in many ways better than Christmas morning itself?

The title track, also the first song on the album, is a wonderful bridge from Sigh No More. It has that full, rich sound you expect from Mumford & Sons. This is when I love them the most, when the music smacks you full in the face and they roar with this intensely masculine fury. But this is a fury that’s softened from, say, “Little Lion Man,” one of my favorite songs on the first album. This is a man who’s gone beyond knowing he’s “really fucked it up this time” to one who “knows [his] weakness, knows [his] voice, so now believe[s] in grace and choice.” We’ll continue to see that maturation throughout the album. Unfortunately, the song also delivers the most eye-rolling lyric on the whole album: ”Press my nose up to the glass around your heart” Try thinking of this literally, someone’s chest cracked open, their heart encased in glass with someone shoving their conk right in there.

“Hopeless Wanderer” shows a man whose nature drives him to wander, to leave, but who wants to stay and “long[s], long[s] to grow old.” The accompaniment in this song is fierce; I’ve never played a steel guitar, but it sounds like it would physically hurt to play with that much intensity, like your fingers would be tattered to the bone at the end of the song but you wouldn’t care, that you’d turn to the audience with a manic grin and ask them to help you love the skies you’re under. For a 20-something figuring out what she wants the next phase of her life to look like, it resonates. There’s that call to keep wandering, to keep looking for that something, but also that acknowledgement that at some point, you have to stop. You have to love where you are and who you are.

In a similarly angry vein, which again, is how I prefer my Mumford, is “Broken Crown.” Like many of their songs, it starts off quiet, restrained but grows into a mad crescendo until everyone’s screaming and pounding the strings of their instrument and it’s beautiful. “Now in this twilight, how dare you speak of grace?” they demand. It’s that emotion I identify with, those moments when someone assures you things will turn out all right but you’re not sure you want them to, because you’ve “fucked it all away,” because you refuse to wear a broken crown and take half of what you might have had.

Just to prove I’m not angry all the time, “Below My Feet” serves as a quiet and introspective reminder of the importance of staying grounded, even when you want to float off or wallow in self pity with your broken crown. The song moves from soft, simple beginnings to a tambourine-enlivened affair, and the balance works better here than in other numbers. “Not With Haste” reminds me of Sigh No More‘s “Roll Away Your Stone,” a beautiful song almost derailed by its Irish-inspired intro, which inevitably has me thinking of a tiny leprechaun dancing around a pot of gold. Moments feel self-indulgent here, with a too-spritely banjo and the awful, terrible lyric, “this ain’t no sham/I am what I am,” which takes me to Yosemite Sam, which is bad. But, all that being said, the one lyric “and I will love with urgency and not with haste” makes up for all that.

As much as I would love to embrace every song here as I did on the first album, it hasn’t happened. Yet. Still could; won’t rule it out. “Holland Road” is imminently foregettable, as is “Lovers’ Eyes.” The biggest failure for me, however, is “Lover of the Light,” simply because it had so much potential. It’s almost like two songs smooshed together–you’ve got the strange syncopation and progression on the ends of the verses, which just brings the song to a screeching halt, especially before the full band kicks in. But when he starts singing about “the lover of the light” with his full voice? I can’t help but love it. The lyrics give me all kinds of shades of “If you can’t be with the one you love, baby love the one you’re with,” which is not necessarily a good thing. This song is almost awesome, but doesn’t create a cohesive whole, and that wasted possibility irks me.

Should you buy this album? Yes. I’m still discovering new little musical flourishes, lyrics I love (or roll my eyes at–that’s how Mumford & Sons roll sometimes. It’s cheese, but it’s a really nicely aged Parmesan), or counting the joyful little “woo!”s that pepper the album and which I love without a trace of irony. One note–I bought the deluxe version from iTunes for one simple reason: there’s an album-only bonus track of “The Boxer,” one of my favorite Simon & Garfunkel songs of all time, and indeed, one of my favorite songs of all time. This version is significantly stripped down, free of some of the cheesy (and wonderful) effects, like the thunder boom and the brass instrumental section from the middle. But it’s still a very worthy cover of the song with a bluegrass twang. The other bonus tracks are nothing to write home about, but that song alone made the extra couple of bucks worth it.

All in all, I still love Mumford & Sons, but maybe we’re in different places in our lives. They’ve grown up and I’m still figuring things out. I can still appreciate the joy and the pain woven through every song, the spangly melodies and the bellowing vocals. Paint my spirit gold, ya’all–it’s a good one.