All Over the Map

Steven Page of the rock band Barenaked Ladies is the guy who managed to rhyme “Pavlov’s dog” with “pedagogue” in the hit song “Brian Wilson.” Recently, Page faced the challenge of his life, setting William Shakespeare’s lyrics to music for a new production of As You Like It that has opened at the Stratford Festival in Ontario and is scheduled to run through the end of October. (“It’s hard to ask for a better co-writer, really,” Page has remarked, “even if he is a little unbending in his approach to collaboration!”)

As all BNL fans know, Page grew up in Canada. The first play he ever saw at the Stratford Festival was Richard II. “It’s a fairly dry play for a 12-year-old,” he points out, “but I was still impressed by the overall tone and weight and complexity of it.” His early experiences at the festival helped shape his appreciation of the arts, from classical theater to opera, and he hopes he can pass that appreciation on to members of a younger generation. “People forget how relevant it is,” he says, adding that many media outlets exacerbate the problem by harshly reviewing shows that display even a hint of innovation or populism. “Traditional theater pages in newspapers keep to their domain,” he comments. “There’s a certain snob appeal.”

Since director Antony Cimolino has set As You Like It in the 1960s, Page’s music nods to the styles of various artists of that time, including The Beatles, The Who, and Simon & Garfunkel. His unique understanding of the material helped him to discover the humor of Shakespeare’s “Deer Song,” for example, and to highlight the poignancy of “Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind.” Although Page does not sing solo in the show, he does provide back-up vocals, and his band recorded the entire score for release on CD; the disc is available through their label’s website and it includes a bonus track, “If Music Be the Food of Love.”

Whereas some other rock musicians use activism as a gimmick, Page has a passionate social conscience. (A recent entry on the band’s weblog comments on the Deep Throat uproar in America, as well as a funny Canadian counterpart.) And at a time when many musicians are siding with record companies on the subject of illegal file-sharing, Page defends the practice. “For all the concern now about P2P sharing, copyright legislation can be a constraint on creativity,” he asserts. “Everybody from Shakespeare to, say, Wagner, borrowed from previous writers.” In fact, Shakespeare lifted the plot of As You Like It from his contemporary Thomas Lodge.

Page enters a new stage in his career with the release of his cheekily titled solo album Vanity Project on June 21. Hopefully, As You Like It won’t be his last foray with theater; he says that he would “jump at the chance” to compose a musical, though he has no interest in the “jukebox” format of such tuners as Mamma Mia! and Good Vibrations. “I would be more excited working on a fresh storyline,” he says. Producers, take note!

— A.K.

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Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird…it’s a plane…it’s Renaissance Man! Everyone’s favorite 15th century artist and inventor is portrayed as a caped crusader in the puppet extravaganza Avanti, Da Vinci!, set to open on June 22 at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta. The concept is so bizarre that it demands attention. It comes from the perverse minds of Jason Hines, the creator of a puppet punk rock group named Clobber, and Jon Ludwig, the guru who was nominated for an Emmy for his direction of the Disney Channel’s The Book of Pooh and was awarded a UNIMA — sort of a puppet Oscar.

The idea resulted from a casual remark by Hines that if Da Vinci ever completed his inventions, he would be like Batman. Hines and Ludwig dug into the master’s notebooks and found a catalogue of devices with which to equip their hero, including a bicycle, a hang-glider, a helicopter, a tank, and a submarine. “Yes, he invented the submarine,” Ludwig asserts, “but he didn’t divulge it for fear that men would use it to sink ships.” In the show, our hero employs every apparatus at his disposal in his fight against the corrupt Borgias, who besiege his patrons (the Medici family) and the distressed damsel with the mysterious smile, Mona Lisa.

Ludwig visited New York during the play’s development to see Mary Zimmerman’s production of The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, which he praises for visualizing “some very dense and eclectic writing.” Zimmerman’s style of directing is known for its acrobatics, but Ludwig’s puppets aren’t encumbered by such minor concerns as gravity; they fly through the air and plunge underwater in the course of their madcap adventures. Although the show obviously plays fast and loose with Da Vinci’s biography, Ludwig says that about 80% of the text comes from creative edits of his notebooks.

Avanti, Da Vinci! features music by composer John Cerreta.The upcoming Atlanta production is actually a revival; it played last year to sold-out houses and then moved on to an international festival in Slovakia, where the company’s Yankee irreverence was a hit among European audiences. Ludwig points out that, whereas European audiences are used to experimental puppetry, Americans still think of puppet theater as a form of entertainment for children. He mentions, for example, a French production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in which the evil queen’s breasts were exposed. “If we did that here, people would flip out!” he exclaims.

According to Ludwig, Da Vinci himself had quite a bizarre imagination: “He actually did write history stories, adventure stories. He wrote one about going to China and fighting a dragon.” He also had a habit of leaving projects unfinished. “One of the reasons he was always interrupted,” the director contends, “was that he had to fight crime.”

— A.K.

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Elton John was in the stands watching a football match, and that made Bill very angry. You see, Bill believes it was the reflected glare off the pop singer’s glasses that temporarily blinded the kicker of his local football club, thus causing the team to lose the Cup Final. British writer David Farr uses this farcical situation as a jumping off point for Elton John’s Glasses, now playing at Chicago Dramatists in a production by Appetite Theatre.

According to director Liz Warton, when she read the script, she “saw an immediate parallel with the sports fanaticism that occurred when our poor Chicago Cubs lost two years ago.” (For those who don’t recall, the Cubs lost a crucial playoff game in 2003 when an overzealous fan reached out and grabbed a fly ball from Moises Alou, an action that prompted other fans to scream for the offender’s blood.) However, the play is not just about football — or “soccer” as we call it here in the States. Warton describes it as “a story of two brothers that learn to live for themselves and not for each other.” Bill reunites with brother Dan after a number of years, forcing the two to come to terms with their relationship. Dan is the leader of a band that includes a man who bears a striking resemblance to Elton John.

Since the show is set in England, Warton acknowledges that “one of the challenges of the script was the dramaturgy. We spent several rehearsals on cultural references and understanding the actual game of football, not to mention dialect work.” The company did not change any of the British references, but “most of the comedy is situational, so the audience doesn’t really miss out on any jokes.” The director even took her cast to a British pub in Chicago to hang out with some of her British ex-pat pals and watch the English League final matches. “It was interesting and exciting to see a group of actors really understand the world of that pub and the world of the play,” she states.

Warton is also the artistic director of the fledgling Appetite Theatre, which she co-founded with executive director Michael Graham and managing director Lauren Golanty. “The best thing about having your own company is that you control everything,” she says: “the artistic quality, casting, production values, marketing, PR, and so on. The two other founders and myself felt that theatre should be treated like a business where you make money and reward everyone for their time and energy.”

Elton John’s Glasses is closing out Appetite’s 2005 season, and Warton is extremely pleased with the selection. “I felt people could relate to this play on a lot of different levels,” she says — and that includes Elton John fans. “Most people love Elton for his costumes, charisma, and his music. The playwright’s attitude towards him is very positive.”

— D.B.