2007 and Beyond!

The Broadway adaptation of High Fidelity closed yesterday, the apparent victim of a mean-spirited New York Times review and lagging ticket sales. The musical is (was?) based on Nick Horby's 1996 novel, which pits a record-store owner against the trials of post-breakup life. The book is basically the Bible to any self-respecting music lover, so we decided to disregard the Times' review and judge the show ourselves.

Tom Kitt, the composer/arranger behind High Fidelity's pop-rock score, took us backstage before the performance. Leading actor Will Chase ("Rob") was lounging around his dressing room in a robe, listening to My Chemical Romance's "Welcome to the Black Parade" and looking like the Broadway equivalent of Hugh Hefner. "Have you heard this new album?" he asked us. "It's really good." But The Black Parade isn't the kind of album that would be carried by Championship Vinyl, Rob's treasured store in High Fidelity, so we decided to let Will Chase get into character without having to entertain random visitors.

Tom Kitt led us back to our seats, where we watched the show and eventually joined the crowd in a standing ovation. High Fidelity certainly has its faults, including a Bruce Springsteen bit that only truly works in the movie (thanks to Springsteen's on-screen cameo). Still, this is not a musical that deserves to be canned after several weeks. Rock 'n' roll is scarce on Broadway right now, and Disney musicals like Beauty and the Beast, Tarzan, Mary Poppins, The Lion King, and the upcoming Little Mermaid are threatening to turn New York's top-tier theaters into visual McDonald's playgrounds for tourists and their toddler children. Has all the creativity and boundary-pushing been relegated to off-Broadway venues?

High Fidelity needed some tweaking before it could be considered Tony-worthy, but we'd rather watch record store employees sing about Jerry Lee Lewis 45s than a bunch of mermaids singing about their desire to have legs.

Rufus Wainright has announced that his next album, Release the Stars, will be the singer's first self-produced record. Neil Tennant (of the Pet Shop Boys) has joined the project as executive producer. According to Wainwright's website, Stars is slated for release in May 2007.

The Germans are quicker than us, apparently, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper ran an article about the Wainwright-Tennant collaboration back in August. Since you can't read the piece without shelling out a few Euros - and since it's written in German - here's a translated excerpt:


Der Hitman von Köpenick ("The Hitman of Köpenick)
How does one actually record a string quartet? That’s the question on the mind of two world famous popstars on a Tuesday afternoon. Neil Tennant, 52, frontman of the Pet Shop Boys, and Rufus Wainwright, 33, labeled “best songwriter of our time” by Elton John, are conferring at the mixer in Room 4 of the former DDR-radio building in Berlin-Köpenick. In the studio, behind a thick sheet of glass, sit four young orchestra musicians, who have just played a string arrangement for Rufus Wainwright’s new record and are waiting to continue.

Again and again, both pop musicians listen to the recording. Wainwright doesn’t look happy. Should it sound like a live recording, Tennant asks, because it does. No, says Wainwright, actually it should sound like Fauré . Hm. Finally, they agree to add a little echo to the microphone during the next take – which does indeed sound a lot better.

Rufus Wainwright is in Berlin to record his new album, and he has asked his friend Neil Tennant to lend him a hand. Actually, Sam Mendes had planned to look in, the famous director, who is shooting a documentary about Wainwright at the moment, but something came up. So the musicians are left alone with a sound engineer in the oversized, mostly empty, ostentatious East German building, in which time seems to have stood still since the fifties. “Nobody's Off the Hook” is the name of the piece they’re working on today, and although it’s a classic pop song, with verses and a chorus, it still sounds like Mahler, Brahms, Bernstein, and a hint of Debussy. - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

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For another Wainwright article (in English, too!), check out this piece from The Observer.

We thought we'd give Town Hall a little more publicity, seeing as they are a non-profit and all... With that in mind, today's entry comes from the cluttered desk of Jason Leahey, a writer/teacher/rockstar-at-large who caught one of Ryan Adams' Town Hall gigs last week.



Ryan Adams and the Cardinals: Live at Town Hall, 12/6/06
Rock artists that book Town Hall are the same artists played between segments of All Things Considered. Well-schooled in his predecessors, poetic and intelligent in his vision, and streaked with country-fried eccentricity, Ryan Adams meets all of the necessary criteria. Not just undeniably good but also sufficiently mature to be considered Art, his music has pricked the ears of those well-groomed and well-paid 30 and 40-somethings who appreciate rock concerts, book release parties, and Knicks games as equal opportunities for social networking over drinks. This is the population that laughs loudly at gallery openings while never noticing the paintings and it is the population that has paid Adams and his band The Cardinals to play Town Hall for three, sold-out nights at the height of the holiday season. They are by no means dominant among the crowd, but as individuals able to shell out fifty bucks a pop two and a half before Christmas, they are many.

Ryan Adams’s talent and sincerity are so beyond dispute, concert reviews inevitably focus on the personality on display. Which Ryan will the audience get tonight? The rambunctious and goofy Ryan? The sullen and quiet Ryan? When he walks on stage and, without a word, rips into the forlorn harmonica that begins crowd favorite "Come Pick Me Up," the answer is obvious. The song would be a radio hit if Adams was a radio artist, but it’s safe to say that it shuffles through many an iPod that carries only a dozen or so Adams cuts. Even the sharp-dressed men who keep checking their Blackberries seem to know it. Opening with the song is like Neil Young opening with "Cinnamon Girl" rather than a track off Trans. Tonight’s Ryan Adams is aiming to please, the audience knows it, and those women with the leather jackets and expensive handbags just might stay interested.

Whoops and thunder fill the hall when the song ends, triumphant fists are raised above the heads of the seated crowd, and then the band is on into "Stars Go Blue," another crowd pleaser. Adams’s falsetto is perfect, the ache in the audience is palpable, the seats themselves seem insulting. Feet beat out the rhythm on the floor and heads cut lazy grooves in the air. A soccer mom in a collarless sweatshirt shakes it at the foot of the stage and sings along. It seems only a matter of time before the whole organism is called awake and dances, croons, cries itself into being.

Adams tells us he’s been sober for seven months. He smiles and mumbles, proudly proclaims that he has forgotten the set list and leads the Cardinals through heartache ballads and screeching rockers. He’s in a rare great mood, decked out in jeans that would make David Lee Roth wince and sporting twin pigtails like antennae. He wears black glasses thick as fenders and blows his cheeks out, flashing a school’s-out grin. He’s the kid in 8th grade who wears his freak on his sleeve, the one giving you Nothing’s Shocking when you’re listening to To The Extreme, the one who snorts Pixie Stix and whose parents have never been seen by anyone. He kicks one leg back and, holy shit!, he’s even wearing Gene Simmons boots. The music veers from Jackson Browne pedal steel to 1950s roadhouse blues to warm, warbling country and it doesn’t matter that the templates formed by past artists are as plain as day. They may have glaring predecessors but they all feel distinctly like Ryan Adams songs, the man’s personality, his adolescent force of will, holding them all together as a catalog. Ryan Adam’s music embodies all that his notorious arrested development implies: the mercurial moods, the goofiness and angst and eagerness to please. The brattiness. These very qualities which can make him so frustrating go hand in hand with an openness to the sounds that have passed through him. He’s a sponge and his songs reflect that. And they are great songs, are being played with real grace and precision, and seem one of a kind.

So it shouldn’t matter that multiple couples seem perfectly content to talk through the whole show, that the women with those handbags keep crashing over everyone’s knees so they can head back to the bar, that no one seems to be singing along. This is New York after all, the city that has the most jaded, cooler-than-you crowds. It’s a terrible city to see a show, particularly if the artist is one of the anointed Artistes, and we know this. The performance is excellent and nothing else should matter.

But it does. After the first half a dozen songs, the swaying and raised arms have mostly gone still. The half-dozen people who stood up for "Afraid Not Scared" have been threatened with expulsion by the ushers. Each yell from the seats feels naked and is drowned out by audience requests, a standard part of most shows but one that makes Adams petulant and sulky. The believers want a b-side, an old Whiskeytown tune. The scenesters want "New York, New York" or another track off their ten-song Ryan Adams Mix. Part of the audience is awestruck and part is wondering if it’s too late to get Christmas Eve reservations at Balthazar. The believers want to move, to sing along, but indifference is always heavier than passion.

And Adams can feel that. His mumbles grow more obscure. He yells into the wings that a button somewhere has not been properly pushed. He is sulky and pissed. Sitting at the piano, he plays "Rescue Blues," a final crowd pleaser, and then skulks off the stage without a word. A roadie brings out a new guitar, ready for the encore, but the lights immediately go up. The elite are up and pushing to get out, excited to have time for another drink in the lobby. The fans stand in place and stare at the stage, angry or exasperated. The sound of sleigh bells barrels out of the speakers and Ryan Adams, in his adolescent angst, does not return to reward those who know that a rock concert is much, much different than a Knicks game.

We added a touch of class to our weekend by putting on a pair on clean jeans, heading uptown, and joining the well-dressed masses at Town Hall. Ryan Adams played a string of shows at Town Hall last week, but this was something different - a live broadcast of the radio variety show A Prairie Home Companion.

We spent some time backstage before the show, where Irish folk singer Karan Casey was cooing at her baby daughter and members of the jazz ensemble Gravity were enjoying vast spreads of complimentary food. The turkey sandwiches looked good, but we snapped out of our hungry daydream when we were introduced to Howard Johnson, the tuba-playing legend who leads Gravity. Johnson’s resume also includes such big names as The Band (Johnson arranged the horn parts and performed on The Last Waltz) and Saturday Night Live (he used to be the show’s bandleader). We briefly talked to the band and wished them luck.