“I think the director must’ve seen the Les Savy Fav show on Sunday
night,” whispered my friend last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,
uttering the only exchange between the two of us for the entire
90-minute New York premiere of Icelandic theatre troop Vesturport’s
Woyzeck at the Howard Gilman Opera House.
The director he was referring to was Gisli Orn Gardarsson, who had masterminded this extremely refashioned rendition of the 1837 play by German proto-expressionist Georg Bchner, which then featured a character known only as “The Drum Major” bounding up and down via a high-mounted bungee contraption, singing a bawdy, braggart anthem of bare-chest-pounding heroics, womanizing and man-on-man violence. His theme song’s most representative couplet, (penned, as all of the lyrics in this modernization are, by rocker Nick Cave) perhaps being this boast: “When I spin my big baton/ all the little girls come!”
The guitar assault behind him was as loud as any (non-My Bloody Valentine) rock gig I’ve attended, and The Drum Major added some fourth-wall-breaking, amphitheatre banter to cement his status as ostentatious, crimson-clad Rock God once he finished assaulting our ear drums. “Hello, New York!” he shouted into the microphone, perched above us on some rafters probably intended for lighting.
If only for a moment, the comparison that my friend was making to the Les Savy Fav show we had seen at the Music Hall Of Williamsburg the Sunday prior seemed apt. Shoutastic Savy frontman Tim Harrington’s costume changes—from a fringed women’s Western jacket to thigh-high socks and a bright orange short shorts, all while singing “Patty Lee” and “Pots and Pans”—are doubly shambolic, and his antics (climbing, crawling and teetering on any surface) are 10 times as dangerous; but between the chiseled, model-quality hunk of The Drum Major and the pudgy, bald, hipster-bearded Harrington, there was a momentary and curious symbiosis.
Harrington, of course, doesn’t work from a script. If, midway through one of the quintet’s post-punk exercises from its recent LP Let’s Stay Friends, he wants to bound through the stage door and reappear on the VIP balcony to sing delightfully skewed sub-sequiturs while leaning forebodingly over the railing—with the security guys suddenly obliged to hold him back by the seat of his pants—then, as he did that night, he will.
Harrington’s props aren’t generally pre-determined either. The cast of Woyzeck retrieved an oversized Earth-as-volleyball and gamely batted it back and forth with members of the BAM audience, The Drum Major even venturing out in to the aisles, whereas a few days earlier, back at the Music Hall, Harrington disappeared among the hundreds of fans on the floor, only to rise up as a crowd surfer being passed back toward the stage—inside of a trash can.
If the comparison here seems either far-fetched (arguable) or obvious (equally arguable), the point is not. Spectacle was readily available in two different Brooklyn institutions that week, and while rock became theater and theater became rock, Woyzeck was more of a bombastic, delightful tangle of head scratchers, with The Fav tending toward explosive, angular head-coverers.
My friend, without whose insight I might never have even considered these events as spectacular cousins, enjoyed both the late-night thrashing we received at the Music Hall and the academic contemplation of madness served up at the Gilman Opera House. Having a degree in theater, he had given me a miniature lecture on Woyzeck as we waited for the lights to dim. I had told him comparatively little about Les Savy Fav, but its platonic essence become apparent to him when Harrington started the set by climbing up out of the audience, a preposterous wig perched on his head, and immediately started spitting water and beer at us between the verses of “The Equestrian.” We were mashed against the stage’s right side, the audience suddenly pogoing, as Harrington threateningly reassured us: “Listen to me,” he sang, “this is no mistake.”
“That was a lot of fun,” he told me as we were exiting the Music Hall that night, “but let’s not go to any more punk shows, OK?” We didn’t talk much about it after that.
The director he was referring to was Gisli Orn Gardarsson, who had masterminded this extremely refashioned rendition of the 1837 play by German proto-expressionist Georg Bchner, which then featured a character known only as “The Drum Major” bounding up and down via a high-mounted bungee contraption, singing a bawdy, braggart anthem of bare-chest-pounding heroics, womanizing and man-on-man violence. His theme song’s most representative couplet, (penned, as all of the lyrics in this modernization are, by rocker Nick Cave) perhaps being this boast: “When I spin my big baton/ all the little girls come!”
The guitar assault behind him was as loud as any (non-My Bloody Valentine) rock gig I’ve attended, and The Drum Major added some fourth-wall-breaking, amphitheatre banter to cement his status as ostentatious, crimson-clad Rock God once he finished assaulting our ear drums. “Hello, New York!” he shouted into the microphone, perched above us on some rafters probably intended for lighting.
If only for a moment, the comparison that my friend was making to the Les Savy Fav show we had seen at the Music Hall Of Williamsburg the Sunday prior seemed apt. Shoutastic Savy frontman Tim Harrington’s costume changes—from a fringed women’s Western jacket to thigh-high socks and a bright orange short shorts, all while singing “Patty Lee” and “Pots and Pans”—are doubly shambolic, and his antics (climbing, crawling and teetering on any surface) are 10 times as dangerous; but between the chiseled, model-quality hunk of The Drum Major and the pudgy, bald, hipster-bearded Harrington, there was a momentary and curious symbiosis.
Harrington, of course, doesn’t work from a script. If, midway through one of the quintet’s post-punk exercises from its recent LP Let’s Stay Friends, he wants to bound through the stage door and reappear on the VIP balcony to sing delightfully skewed sub-sequiturs while leaning forebodingly over the railing—with the security guys suddenly obliged to hold him back by the seat of his pants—then, as he did that night, he will.
Harrington’s props aren’t generally pre-determined either. The cast of Woyzeck retrieved an oversized Earth-as-volleyball and gamely batted it back and forth with members of the BAM audience, The Drum Major even venturing out in to the aisles, whereas a few days earlier, back at the Music Hall, Harrington disappeared among the hundreds of fans on the floor, only to rise up as a crowd surfer being passed back toward the stage—inside of a trash can.
If the comparison here seems either far-fetched (arguable) or obvious (equally arguable), the point is not. Spectacle was readily available in two different Brooklyn institutions that week, and while rock became theater and theater became rock, Woyzeck was more of a bombastic, delightful tangle of head scratchers, with The Fav tending toward explosive, angular head-coverers.
My friend, without whose insight I might never have even considered these events as spectacular cousins, enjoyed both the late-night thrashing we received at the Music Hall and the academic contemplation of madness served up at the Gilman Opera House. Having a degree in theater, he had given me a miniature lecture on Woyzeck as we waited for the lights to dim. I had told him comparatively little about Les Savy Fav, but its platonic essence become apparent to him when Harrington started the set by climbing up out of the audience, a preposterous wig perched on his head, and immediately started spitting water and beer at us between the verses of “The Equestrian.” We were mashed against the stage’s right side, the audience suddenly pogoing, as Harrington threateningly reassured us: “Listen to me,” he sang, “this is no mistake.”
“That was a lot of fun,” he told me as we were exiting the Music Hall that night, “but let’s not go to any more punk shows, OK?” We didn’t talk much about it after that.
