Konstanstin Sergeyev
WHAT DO YOU get when you combine punk rock,Vaudeville cabaret, modern technology and a greatly misunderstood character actor from America’s golden age of film? Everyone agrees:You get a bad idea. Specifically you get Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre’s 20th Century.
Conceived as “a hybrid punk rock multi-media theater event,” the piece presents Lorre’s dramatic life story through music, video, costume and the occasional mosh pit. If the music sounds familiar, it’s because the show’s composer, the World Inferno Friendship Society, has been crowding New York stages for years with rousing orchestral freak-outs. An already theatrical rock group, it has now taken teamed up with director Jay Scheib and arKtype producer Thomas O. Kriegsmann to create a one night-only spectacle to be performed at Webster Hall on Jan. 9. Appearing with the group is drummer Brian Viglione, a fitting choice, considering he helped spark the early aughties’ explosion of cabaret-punk acts in his role as Weimar heartthrob and drummer in Boston-bred sensation The Dresden Dolls. Perhaps an even brighter idea is the drafting of Peter Lorre, a long-dead cinema icon, as subject of the show. “Everything we want to talk about is acted out in his life,” Inferno frontman and main songwriter Jack Terricloth (who plays Lorre in the show) explains. “Success, alienation, drug addiction, getting kicked around the world by forces you can’t control.” It also it doesn’t hurt that Lorre played villains and vampires in those creepy old films the band’s target demographic adores: “If you can find me a punk rocker that doesn’t have a thing for vampires, I’d be shocked.”
Lorre himself may not have been so punk. Despite his masterful portrayals of demented characters in films like M and Casablanca, he felt somewhat boxed in by his status as a character actor. After finding success working on dark films directed by the likes of Fritz Lang in his native Austria and then Germany, the Jewish actor fled the Nazis and re-settled in Los Angeles, only to find he was typecast time and again. He famously derided his craft as “face-making,” a theme Terricloth picks up on in the ballad “I Just Make Faces:” “I don’t act/ I just make faces.”
“He was always an outsider,”Terricloth said. “In the U.S. he was just booked as the creepy foreigner who’s out to getcha.” Nonetheless, “being in a bad position and keeping a sense of humor about it might be the message of his life. Rising above.”
“Lorre seemed to have the same idealism we have,” the card-carrying anarchist continued. “We care a lot about something.” A lot of that “something” refers to those titular bad ideas he had, like quitting his bank teller job in Vienna to be an actor. As “an artist who had ideals” and rejected society’s norms, Lorre should put a sparkle in every young punk’s eye. “He was an antecedent to what World Inferno is.” Also relevant to modern audiences are the political conditions in which Lorre toiled. “Pogroms and paranoia relate to the times now,” says Terricloth. “Government is becoming rapidly weird.” The concept of “the other” has long been a key part of both fascist and American propaganda, and unfortunately for Lorre, the German-Jew status which so endangered him overseas, also made him a symbol of everything Americans feared.
And just when he thought he was out of danger, the McCarthy hearings came along and “gray listed” his fledgling production company due to his friendship with confirmed communist and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Like many fallen bohemians, he suffered from alcohol and drug addiction later in life and died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1964. Sad for him, but juicy topics for Terricloth, who believes such a salacious biography “allows you to write about things you wouldn’t normally write about.”
After playing a few shows in Holland, Terricloth is sure that the U.S. premiere will be a thrilling mash-up both on stage and in the audience. “Sometimes we get a punk rock crowd and sometimes we get a theater crowd,” he explains; “it’s very entertaining when those worlds meet.” And by punk rockers, he of course means the rowdy all-ages crowd that causes a ruckus in its striped, patched and tattered Sunday best. Of watching the crowd take in both the spectacle and the music,Terricloth says, “It’s an absolute riot in an evening dress every night.”
Conceived as “a hybrid punk rock multi-media theater event,” the piece presents Lorre’s dramatic life story through music, video, costume and the occasional mosh pit. If the music sounds familiar, it’s because the show’s composer, the World Inferno Friendship Society, has been crowding New York stages for years with rousing orchestral freak-outs. An already theatrical rock group, it has now taken teamed up with director Jay Scheib and arKtype producer Thomas O. Kriegsmann to create a one night-only spectacle to be performed at Webster Hall on Jan. 9. Appearing with the group is drummer Brian Viglione, a fitting choice, considering he helped spark the early aughties’ explosion of cabaret-punk acts in his role as Weimar heartthrob and drummer in Boston-bred sensation The Dresden Dolls. Perhaps an even brighter idea is the drafting of Peter Lorre, a long-dead cinema icon, as subject of the show. “Everything we want to talk about is acted out in his life,” Inferno frontman and main songwriter Jack Terricloth (who plays Lorre in the show) explains. “Success, alienation, drug addiction, getting kicked around the world by forces you can’t control.” It also it doesn’t hurt that Lorre played villains and vampires in those creepy old films the band’s target demographic adores: “If you can find me a punk rocker that doesn’t have a thing for vampires, I’d be shocked.”
Lorre himself may not have been so punk. Despite his masterful portrayals of demented characters in films like M and Casablanca, he felt somewhat boxed in by his status as a character actor. After finding success working on dark films directed by the likes of Fritz Lang in his native Austria and then Germany, the Jewish actor fled the Nazis and re-settled in Los Angeles, only to find he was typecast time and again. He famously derided his craft as “face-making,” a theme Terricloth picks up on in the ballad “I Just Make Faces:” “I don’t act/ I just make faces.”
“He was always an outsider,”Terricloth said. “In the U.S. he was just booked as the creepy foreigner who’s out to getcha.” Nonetheless, “being in a bad position and keeping a sense of humor about it might be the message of his life. Rising above.”
“Lorre seemed to have the same idealism we have,” the card-carrying anarchist continued. “We care a lot about something.” A lot of that “something” refers to those titular bad ideas he had, like quitting his bank teller job in Vienna to be an actor. As “an artist who had ideals” and rejected society’s norms, Lorre should put a sparkle in every young punk’s eye. “He was an antecedent to what World Inferno is.” Also relevant to modern audiences are the political conditions in which Lorre toiled. “Pogroms and paranoia relate to the times now,” says Terricloth. “Government is becoming rapidly weird.” The concept of “the other” has long been a key part of both fascist and American propaganda, and unfortunately for Lorre, the German-Jew status which so endangered him overseas, also made him a symbol of everything Americans feared.
And just when he thought he was out of danger, the McCarthy hearings came along and “gray listed” his fledgling production company due to his friendship with confirmed communist and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Like many fallen bohemians, he suffered from alcohol and drug addiction later in life and died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1964. Sad for him, but juicy topics for Terricloth, who believes such a salacious biography “allows you to write about things you wouldn’t normally write about.”
After playing a few shows in Holland, Terricloth is sure that the U.S. premiere will be a thrilling mash-up both on stage and in the audience. “Sometimes we get a punk rock crowd and sometimes we get a theater crowd,” he explains; “it’s very entertaining when those worlds meet.” And by punk rockers, he of course means the rowdy all-ages crowd that causes a ruckus in its striped, patched and tattered Sunday best. Of watching the crowd take in both the spectacle and the music,Terricloth says, “It’s an absolute riot in an evening dress every night.”
> Addicted To Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre’s 20th Century
Webster Hall, 125 E. 11th St. (betw. 3rd & 4th Aves.), 212-353-1600; 8, $20
