Indie-Rock Musicals
By BENJAMIN NUGENT
Published: December 9, 2007
This year, a young corner of the theater world turned to musicals scored with indie rock — rock music that deliberately avoids the traditional pop-song structures, widely accessible themes and smooth production of classic radio fare. “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” written and directed by Alex Timbers, with music and lyrics by Michael Friedman, uses slightly sloppy emo guitar riffs and raw, punkish singing to convey the underdog mentality of the frontier populists who founded the Democratic Party and bled the Indians. “Caravan Man,” with book by Tommy Smith and music by Gabriel Kahane (who will perform in “Bloody Bloody”), went up in summer as a work in progress at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts, where “Bloody Bloody” was workshopped last year, and tells the story of the prophet Muhammad through alt-country songs stylistically similar to the rough-edged ballads of Ryan Adams. Meanwhile, “Love Kills” draws on the hardcore fringe of emo to revisit the murderous Nebraska couple famously portrayed in the film “Badlands”; its book and music are by Kyle Jarrow, Timbers’s sometime writing partner.
One might assume the daddy of them all is the hit musical adaptation of the 1891 German play “Spring Awakening,” which features sometimes punk-flavored music by the singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik. But Timbers started work on “Bloody Bloody” before the Off Broadway premiere of “Spring Awakening.” Why did he and his theater peers choose to work with indie rock? It may be because the idiom’s technical tics and idiosyncrasies lend their productions a feel of eccentricity, and of endearing amateurism, qualities still largely alien to Broadway.
As for indie musicians themselves, they’ve often prided themselves on their aversion to theatrical excess. But a few of the breed experimented with Broadway elements this year, embracing showmanship, storytelling and classical instrumentation. The singer Sufjan Stevens’s audiovisual suite about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, “The BQE,” was essentially a musical-theater piece, though it ignored the musical’s conventions. It brought together folk-tinged songs, a film, an orchestra and dancers — choreographed Hula-Hoopers, to be specific.