Category: Musical-Theatre-Opera-Dance

Wordless! words by Art Spiegelman, music by Phillip Johnston

A video introduction to Wordless! , an intellectual vaudeville.

The Wordless! Tumblr.

In his Pulitzer prize-winning masterpiece, MAUS—a moving father-son memoir about the Holocaust drawn with cats and mice—Art Spiegelman changed the definition of comics forever. In WORDLESS!, a brand new and stimulating hybrid of slides, talk and musical performance, he probes further into the nature and possibilities of his medium.

Spiegelman, noted as a historian and theorist of comics as well as an artist, collaborates with Phillip Johnston, the critically acclaimed jazz composer who wrote all-new scores he will be performing live with his sextet, The Silent Six.

Johnston’s music accompanies the cartoonist’s personal tour of the first legitimate “graphic novels”— silent picture stories made by early 20th century masters like Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward and Milt Gross—and their influence on him. As Spiegelman explores “the battle between Words and Pictures”, he smashes at the hyphen between High and Low Art in a presentation featuring a new work drawn specifically for this project, “Shaping Thought.”

Spiegelman has been named one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People” and his work has been translated into over 25 languages. He co-edited the influential magazine RAW with his spouse and frequent collaborator, Françoise Mouly, and has created many covers for The New Yorker. Spiegelman’s most recent book is CO-MIX, A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps.

Phillip Johnston is best known for his work as a jazz composer (Microscopic Septet, Big Trouble, Fast ‘N’ Bulbous), film composer (The Music of Chance, Noise) and creator of music for silent films, most recently Lotte Reiniger’s 1927 animated feature, The Adventures of Prince Achmed. The Microscopic Septet’s forthcoming CD on Cuneiform Records is called I’ve Been Up So Long It Looks Like Down To Me: The Micros Play The Blues.

“…Spiegelman delights in undermining stuffy theory, letting Johnston’s music burst in to express his joy on seeing the stories that flash before us . . . Spiegelman creates mystery in the play between his lecture and Johnston’s music. It’s disorienting, but as he warned us at the beginning, that’s part of the point.”

––Paul Blacklund, Paris Review

Drawn To Death: A Three Panel Opera Book and lyrics by Art Spiegelman, music by Phillip Johnston

Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman (Maus I, Maus II) and avant-jazz composer Phillip Johnston scrutinize and welcome that bastard, hunchback dwarf of the arts — comix! — to the rarified world of music theater in Drawn to Death: A Three Panel Opera.

The work chronicles the rise and fall of the American comic book from its birth in the 1930’s to its near-death in the 1950’s, as well as the destruction of two of the industry’s leading cartoonists: Bob Wood, co founder of Crime Does Not Pay, a popular comic with a monthly readership of over 6,000,000; and Jack Cole, creator of the memorable Plastic Man, the original morphing superhero. The hysteria that focused on the “comic book menace” during the Cold War included organized comic book burnings, climaxed in the 1954 U.S. Senate Hearings on Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency, and resulted in the Comics Code Seal of Approval, the most extreme censorship ever imposed on any form of mass media.

Drawn To Death: A Three Panel Opera situates itself squarely on the hyphen between the High and Low Arts and examines America’s fascination with lurid violence on the one hand and its puritanism and yearning for “easy fixes” on the other. Narrated by the ghoulish Mr. Crime, A Three Panel Opera unfolds against projected images resembling comic book art, underscored by a live band of actor/singers and musicians.

This piece was in development for several years in the early 2000s, including work-in-progress versions at Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center, Arts At St. Ann’s, the American Repertory Theatre, and New York Theater Workshop. It is currently complete in complete  draft form, and languishing in wait for a producer of courage.

Young Goodman Brown (1995), Based on the short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown is an opera with music by Phillip Johnston, libretto by R. Foreman, directed by David Hershkovits, originally produced in 1995 at LaMama ETC, NYC by Target Margin Theater.

 

 

 

 

Young Goodman Brown – Reviews

The Village Voice (Marc Robinson)

“The deliberate tension between Herskovits and Phillip Johnston, the composer, is as charged as that between Brown and the Devil. Where the director is restrained, the composer is generous. Where the story’s focus narrows, the music grows more luxurious. The score is deceptive. Like Virgil Thompson, Johnston lures his listeners with pretty melodies, folk simplicity and the occasional quotation. . . but Johnston is always shifting gears: Each new tune is as pretty as the last, but we expect its interruption and wonder what’s next.”

The New York Times (Ben Brantley)

“The chief interest here is Mr. Johnston’s music, smoothly performed here by a five-member orchestra under Christopher Berg’s direction. The solemn portentous framework is subliminally laced with jazz, Latin dance tunes, waltzes and modernist dissonance. It vaguely suggests a subversive, nightclub version of Britten’s ‘Peter Grimes,’ appropriate music for divided souls. Johnston works on a small canvas, but he packs a lot into it.”

American Theater (Randy Gener)

“What drives this faithful Young Goodman Brown forward is the seductive elegance of Phillip Johnston’s jazzy opera music. …Johnston takes more leaps with the material than his librettist does. The felicitous mutation from one genre to another–Latin jazz, gospel rock, waltzes, Monk-like ballads and Kurt Weill melodies, even burst of Burt Bacharach flit in and out of the score–is brainily allusive, subtly offhand and often precipitous as each style mixes and matches with plot crinkles, character turns and imagistic twists. Neither European eclectic nor pastiche, Johnston’s silken jigsaw-puzzle musical patterns–a chamber opera extension of his cracked-jazz devil-may-care oeuvre–fit quite well with Hawthorne’s sprightly way of hanging heavy symbols on strings of pretty words.”

New York Newsday (Jan Stuart)

“The chief interest here is Johnston’s score, a rhythmically promiscuous melding of jazz, pop and chorale motifs sung with escalating intensity by a cast of twelve. . . The composer sets up a witty musical opposition between Goodman and the Devil, finding a more conventionally stentorian vein for the former and a corrupting rock and roll style for the latter.”

The Village Voice (Leighton Kerner)

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if a time warp had let Gustave Mahler and Nathaniel Hawthorne meet each other and talk about life, and, of course, mortality. The thought re-emerged … when I went to LaMaMa’s Annex for the last performance of Young Goodman Brown, a frisky little opera based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story of the same name. Phillip Johnston’s music and Richard Foreman’s libretto effectively wipe away much of Hawthorne’s rather off-putting gloom. . . . A delight.”