Beowulf is strange ; a series of historical accidents has made it practically the oldest surviving work in our language, but the tale of the Scandinavian hero and the monsters he fights is both linguistically and culturally alien to modern readers.The idea of adapting it into a musical sounds like a joke, but Berkeley’s Shotgun Players’ presentation of Beowulf:A Thousand Years of Baggage, currently playing at the Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side, pulls off the stunt pretty well. Certainly better than the absurd Angelina Jolie animated adaptation from a couple years back.
Beowulf, as played by Jason Craig (who also wrote the script) is appropriately large and bearish, though accessorized with glasses and a Mohawk. He’s a lumbering, aggressive oaf—a blend of late-stage Elvis and a Will Ferrell character. Before we meet him, though, we have three academics, played by Jessica Jelliffe, Christopher Kuckenbaker and Beth Wilmurt, grappling with the interpretation of Beowulf at a conference. Later in the “songplay” (as the show dubs itself), they will literally grapple with him, as they are double-cast as the monster Grendel (Kuckenbaker) and Grendel’s mother (Jelliffe).
The acting is uniformly good and the musicians in the eight-piece band are all talented. Dave Malloy, the show’s composer, counts as both, since he plays King Hrothgar and also leads the band onstage. Best of all is the inventive staging; nearly every scene has its own wonderful little touch: Hrothgar summons Beowulf while being wheeled around the stage playing an accordion, Beowulf cuts his way through the set in his entrance, Beowulf and Grendel fight in a quickly assembled wrestling ring and his battle with Grendel’s mother in the bottom of a lake is symbolized with five fish tanks of varying size.The actors sing into microphones descended from the ceiling, which gives the show the feel of a night of WWE Raw where the wrestlershave been replaced with performance studies grad students.
Malloy’s music is clever and eclectic, a mélange of rock, electronica, 1940s cabaret, klezmer and other influences. Unfortunately, it’s not very catchy. None of the songs stick with you after the show is over. Perhaps this is the fault of the libretto; while the spoken dialogue is often very good, the lyrics are the show’s weakest link, full of repetition and vague wording. Many of the lyrics sound as if they’re being made up on the spot. While it’s incredibly difficult to write smart lyrics, in this case the vagueness is a deliberate choice: The production strives to avoid the schlocky theatricality of conventional musicals.This is a commendable decision, but where the experimentation in the dialogue and the staging is clever, in the lyrics it’s not.
Nevertheless, the show is fiercely intelligent and well worth seeing. By the end, it’s clear that Beowulf is really in conflict with the academics. He resists their interpretations; he doesn’t want to be a symbol. He demands the honorable death fighting a dragon that the text gives him, but the Third Academic (Wilmurt) refuses. She claims that the dragon-death is just a sort of midlife crisis. In the end he enrages her to the point where she does summon the dragon, represented by a wall of whirring box fans. She sings the passage in Old English, and Beowulf gets his death scene.
It’s beautiful.
> Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage
Through April 18, Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St. (betw. Pitt & Willett Sts.), 212-598-0400; times vary, $20.
