The Blats, we’ve been officially informed (by a hand-scrawled press release which charmingly misspells two of the band members’ names), have a new bassist. So much for loyalty to old school chums. We quote, from a column last month: “Some things are bigger than the music.” Yeah, like the stars in a singer’s eyes when he’s been convinced that a big-label contract is in the mail—“if only…” The reason cited in the release: “creative differences.” Just like the big boys…

More secure bands (and they all are): Release Candidate tonight at the Bullfinch, Sanitation Library does covers at Hamilton’s and KSES does the old-school Euro dance thing at Dollaire’s…

The Noel Coward Reader
Edited and with commentary by Barry Day. Foreword by Cameron Mackintosh.Alfrd A. Knopf, 2010. 599 pages.

In Finishing the Hat, Sondheim is openly dismissive of Noel Coward, and not just casually so. The younger composer (now 80—Coward died in 1973 at age 73) turns Coward into a icon of fluff, a name to conjure up only when discussing superficial songwriting of a transitory nature.

The Noel Coward Reader, happily coincidentally released around the same as Sondheim’s book, is a reasoned and overwhelming response to such tenuous criticism of one of the best known theater artists of the 20th century. The Reader even strangely shares roughly the same format as Finishing the Hat: lyrics and scripts extracts annotated with anecdotes, historical information and obscure bonus items. Neither book is a mere “best of” or “collected works.” Each is overloaded with trivia, tangents and strong opinions that have rarely surfaced in other biographies until now. Where Sondheim’s book has the more contemporary voice, what with his still alive and all, the long-dead Coward’s is astonishingly vital. He has ready comments on everything, because whereas Sondheim has never published a memoir before this, Coward kept voluminous diaries (published a couple of years ago as edited by the same respectful hand that guides this Reader, Barry Day) and journals, not to mention a two-volume autobiography.

Other stats:
Sondheim: around 20 musicals (a couple of them as lyricist only) plus half a dozen revues, a handful of songs that didn’t make it into shows and a few original film and TV scripts.
Coward: Half a dozen musicals, at least as many revues, over 30 full-length plays, a popular three-night compendium of ten one-act plays, over two hundred stand-alone songs and a few original film and TV scripts. Plus his simultaneous career as a performer—in films by others, in many of his own works, and in his famous cabaret appearances.

Coward’s prolificity might indeed speak to a less perfectionist mood. But he was more of a risktaker than many believed, and his commercial and critical successes were well-earned. His shows, when done today, tend to impress those who think of them as fluffy. The main response I get from artistic directors when I wonder aloud why, outside of Private Lives and Blithe Spirit and Design for Living, more Coward plays and musicals aren’t produced these days, is an economic excuse: the casts are too big. That’s the common reasoning behind the lack of Shaw revivals as well, and few would regard Shaw as lightweight or outdated or unable to be fitted for contemporary audiences. But the image of Coward’s works as hopelessly of their time, or “thin” (a criticism he endured, and articulately addressed during his lifetime, much more amusingly than Sondheim deflects charges of being obtuse or overly complex). This book shows conclusively that while his works may be, and usually are, played lightly, they weren’t written haphazardly. There’s little doubt that Coward’s scripts could stand up to some pretty wild directorial and design-conscious reinterpretations—they just tend not to be looked at that way, though the recent Broadway success of Brief Encounter (a stage adaptation of the era-defining 1945 David Lean film which grew out of the Coward one-act Still Life) seems to be a step in that direction. Maybe someday Coward will be as freely and friskily interpreted as some of the later Sondheim works.

As for interpreters, Sondheim can rave about the glories of Elaine Stritch, but Coward got there first, jumpstarting her career with a role in his revue Sail Away. And Follies or A Little Night Music may be credited with finding great roles for seasoned stars in the twilight of their careers, but Coward was doing the same sort of conscientious casting decades earlier with “Hay Fever,” Waiting in the Wings,” “A Song at Twilight” and other age-appropriate works.

As to the comparative charms of Finishing the Hat and the Noel Coward Reader, Sondheim writes a lot about his own writing process, but Coward was involved in many of his own shows as not just writer and composer but star. This makes a book like this, even without his direct involvement, much more vibrant. The sheer variety of material available is exhilarating, a chance to rediscover this multi-threat artist’s talent on many levels. There are lyrics, extra verses, script extracts, lesser-known script extracts, bits of screenplays, essays, memoirs, correspondence, profiles of his collaborators, even a culminating poem about mortality and a self-penned epitaph.

Coward’s commentary on some shows takes the takes the form of self-mocking scripts. “Design for Rehearsing” is a sketch about what it’s like to work with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, married actors so attuned to each others’ methods that they could be oblivious to the needs of their other co-stars, even their dear friend (and indeed, their guiding playwright) Noel Coward.

Coward was also much more self-critical and aware concerning the tone and depth of his shows than Sondheim gives him credit for being. While acknowledging its popular success, he deplored Margaret Rutherford’s portrayal of the séance-leader Madame Arcati in the original production of Blithe Spirit. Coward noted the dark undercurrents of many of his plays, explains how he began fashioning them more for longterm impact than as a string of one-liners. Whether in dramas or comedies, he wasn’t afraid to tackle themes of adultery, war, sexual incompatibility and the afterlife. He also writes as smartly about backstage strife and preparation as anyone short of, say, Stanislavsky, whom he’s also much funnier than. Not only do we get the lyrics “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington” along with a quote stating that the song’s intention to dissuade stage mothers from inflicting their young on audiences was to be taken seriously, we get the newspaper piece “A Warning to Actors,” as well as its companion piece “A Warning to Critics” and a paragraph from “A Warning to Pioneers” (i.e. playwrights).

What ends up being remarkable about The Noel Coward Reader is how effortlessly it dispels any sense of Coward as a minor or fleeting talent. It is a testament to his range, his flair, his outspokenness and openness, and his deserved bid for theater immortality.

Teddy of Minimizer has gone from frontman to, well, the other way around. He didn’t realize quite what a stir he’d cause when he exposed his backside for the band’s debut CD Brief.

(You’ll have to buy a copy to get the full effect. Teddy’s pretty skimpily dressed, in his accustomed T-shirt and short-shorts, on the cover, but saves the full reveal for the inside lyrics page.)

The main problem is that having heard of this penchant for exhibitionism, the band’s fans—and mostly its hecklers—are exhorting Teddy to do the CD stunt live. It added a little saucy fun to Minimizer’s set Saturday night at Hamilton’s, but only for like a minute. Then it became really annoying.

As many a burlesque artist has learned, less is more. Like, Brief should’ve been an EP.

Even for BBC’s Radio 4, What the Papers Say sticks out. The station provides a deft yet dizzying programming mix of current events, sitcoms, news, comical news quizzes and soap operas, justified by the loose rubric “spoken word.” (On its website it describes itself as “a speech station for curious minds.”) What the Papers Say provides that theatrical and journalistic mix within one short weekly show.

What the Papers Say presents stories from the week’s newspapers simply by reading them aloud in a dramatic fashion. This is a great change from the usual BBC newsreaders, a corps of interchangeable voices who deliver the headlines in a flat, clear manner so devoid of overt regional or national accents that the style has been labeled “The BBC accent,” as if it’s a linguistic culture unto itself.

While emotive, What the Papers Say’s voices aren’t particularly realistic—the voices fall into clichéd attitudes that have graced mainstream theater characters for centuries: Upper-class burbling, lower-class snarling, snippy academic instruction, imperious political pronouncments. Americans invariably have Texas drawls.

Before its current BBC incarnation (which kicked off with a special election-time series in the spring of 2010 before becoming a Sunday night staple, What the Papers Say was a TV institution. It aired for 52 years on a number of different channels or networks, becoming the second longest-running program in British TV history.

For all the shortsighted current blather about how political rhetoric has become increasingly theatrical and sensationalisitic, this is evidence (as if any was needed) that stageworthy essay-writing or incendiary speechmaking nothing new. What the Papers Say also demonstrates how inflammatory rhetoric can be more about delivery than content.

The newspaper excepts which What the Papers Say turns into a radio script were not intended to be read aloud. When they are, they fall easily into categories which fit the actors’ stereotypical characterizations. Headlines, when stripped of their original need to be concise yet directly informative, come off as needlessly shouty and simplistic. Op-ed columns, which contain a strong first-person voice yet are carefully composed for print, seem abjectly scolding or patronizing.

Sometimes the cross-media interpretation adds to the pithiness or pertinences of the print-writers’ points. Other times, not so much, turning the well-turned phrases into punchlines.

What the Papers Say isn’t at all What the Papers Mean. It isn’t even What the Papers Might Say If They Could Talk. It’s “Papers Say the Darnedest Things,” in the manner of another long-running TV humor bit which got most of its comedy from formalizing them and taking them out of context—Art Linkletter’s interviews with precocious youngsters on his old House Party series. On the surface, such comedy is surefire. But you don’t have to think about it long before you realize that this is due to the misshaping of vulnerable material.

There was sewer maintenance on Billy Club’s block last week, and it collaborated with him on four songs. “First, I took a rhythm track—I recorded the pumps they were using. Then I added water sounds of my own– peeing, jiggling the toilet handle… Then I put some effects and filters on it, and added some underwater vocals.”

Like the band that played while the titanic sank, we imagine. Only dirtier. One of the compositions debuts this week at the Bullfinch Open Mic, which is where the celebrated Mr. Club—who by day is a graduate student in ethnomusicology at the university on the hill—holds dress rehearsals for his school recitals. The complete sullied sewerific song cycle can be heard a fortnight hence in the school’s Standard Auditorium.

All this talk of septic filters has us craving purer sounds. The club- friendly church octet kleen exults in acoustic mornings and complex harmonies Tuesday night at the Finch. Coincidentally (we hope), two alleged devil worshipping acts are at Hamilton’s: Flush America and Stopper. Portent of the apocalypse.

I’m going to start by saying that that not everybody needs to have a Record That Changed Their Life.

After all, I’m being literal with this assignment, not hyperbolic. Certain works of art have the capacity to alter how we think, feel, behave towards others, choose a career or life path and maneuver the vagaries of existence.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I didn’t have a Record That Changed My Life. A love of music was always in me, and at a very young age I’d already absorbed much of the mystery of it. I understood the basics, even an array of abstractions. There were very few surprises, just myriad and unending small pleasures.

No single record formed the foundation of my formative tastes. It was a shifting mosaic. It would be inaccurate and ungrateful to single out any one example and exalt it as life-changing. For a list of merely great records, I could list many. I could also cite a bunch of sounds which I personally consider to represent seismic changes in pop culture—the low-key bass of David Essex’s “Rock On,” for instance, or the needle-pinning drum bombast of Gary Glitter’s hits of the same era, found studio sounds which shaped not just songs but whole genres. I can argue the importance of such records for hours, stopping only to luxuriate in the playing of them, but I would not consider them personally life-changing. That’s a higher order.

Nevertheless, now that you perceive the gravity of my making such a statement (who knew that this was going to start sounding like an Edgar Allen Poe story?), I do have a Record That Changed My Life. It was released when I was 15 years old, and I admit that this is a prime age to get swept up in and overrate things. But the record still exerts a massive hold on me three and half decades later. This is despite the fact that I’ve only ever really liked a small portion of it.

Live at the Rat was recorded at the club of that name (actually, a longer name–The Rathskeller) in Kenmore Square, Boston over a four-night span in late September, 1976.

I was not at the shows; as I say, I was 15. I was not aware of any of these bands, though given my prodigious tastes at the time, it was only a fluke that I hadn’t already discovered either Willie “Loco” Alexander and The Real Kids by that time.

But I hadn’t, and they were a revelation. Alexander didn’t just exhibit a fanboy literary streak I found highly appealing, bringing his idolatry of Jack Kerouac down to club-level directness, he also exhibited his own freeform creative genius, improvising the yelped lyrics for “Pup Tune” which included shout-outs to both Third Rail (also on the Live at the Rat bill) and international salsa superstar Celia Cruz.

At the time, Alexander’s rock career was a decade old—he’d been signed to Capitol Records as a harbinger of the ill-fated “Bosstown Sound,” had become a member of the last (Lou Reedless) line-up of the Velvet Underground. Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler had been photographed dancing to one of Alexander’s bands. Rather than stand apart from the still-fragmented nascent Boston punk scene, Willie Alexander embraced it, and two of his three tracks on Live at the Rat directly reference the new breed.

Not every act on the album catches the same cultural shift. Thundertrain’s embarrassing “I’ve Got to Rock” was the kind of old-school headbanger many Rat bands were trying to get away from. That just makes Live at the Rat more profound as a historical document, to my ears. You hear DMZ doing a primitive version of the ‘60s-garage purity which Mono Mann’s later band The Lyres would be famous for. (One of the best live shows I’ve seen all my life was at the Rat for New Year’s in the mid-‘80s with The Lyres and The Nervous Eaters).

When I first heard the record, I didn’t know what half the local references were to. I misheard Willie Alexander’s spoken intro to “At the Rat” as “Boston rock and roll started right here… and there it remains” instead of “…with Barry and the Remains.” Elsewhere on the album, I didn’t get that Marc Thor’s whimsical “Circling L.A.” was meant to satirize Jonathan Richman until Oedipus (the first punk DJ in the area, and one of the first in the country) mentioned it on his WBCN show. Decoding this music, in a way, became my life’s work. I started looking at bands roots-and-all, needing to know where their names came from, who’d played with whom before, where they most preferred to play.

I found At the Rat equal parts inviting and intimidating—a club that seemed ridiculously easy to join, yet you may never know if you’d been accepted. I spent the rest of my youth observing that scene from booths near the back of the room, more like an ornithologist than the flying creature I wanted to be, swooping amid the grooves in search of tasty rodents.

By Artie Capshaw

Little victories matter in our sensitive scene. Yesterday we were riffling through the rejects at the Stupendous Triumphant Acetone Records shoppe when a woman in her 30s wandered in looking for “Latent” by American Hop. A woman! In her 30s!

Joy of joys (not for her, but for our scenario here), she didn’t know the name of the band, or the right name of the song. She’d heard it on the radio! She didn’t know anyone who had anything to do with the record. SHE JUST LIKED IT! Take that, industry suits! The A-Hops turned out a disk on their own, with no development money or focus groups or farm teams, and caught the ear of an unlikely demographic. Sign ’em. And listen to ’em!

During the same bout of browsing, we were told Babahoya killed at our new gov’s inauguration ball, and suddenly has bookings for similar hoity-toits across the capitol, plus a few leads into other jurisdictions altogether. Way to go—but make sure you come back from time to time, guys. We need our regular dose of “Banana Bunchy Top.”

Do days get brighter than this?

Well, sure, when there’s all that sunshine reflecting off the newfallen snow. Let’s see if we can spin this in a positive way—no guaranteed shows at any of the regular clubs tonight due to the intense snowfall. Bullfinch was trying to plow the sidewalk, so there’ll at least be drinking there.

The rock bands these days seem like the same bands of a decade ago, only younger. And the same can be said for municipal superheroes. The ones we’ve glimpsed along the skyline at dusk in recent months (yeah, we’re capespotters; go make fun) are decked out like their forebears. But it would take a lot of looking the other way to accept that these are the same heroes, or even blood relations of those heroes.

In Gotham City alone, we’ve seen a younger, blonder Batgirl, the nimblest Robin in decades and what seem to be a plethora of Batmen. Has someone started a franchise?

Alas, not much is known about the habitats and nesting habits of superheroes, especially the more batlike ones. More’s the pity. Over in Metropolis, Superman has subjected himself to numerous scientific tests over the years, and his younger self has even reportedly been cloned. The man himself is currently hiking cross-country, allowing hordes of gawkers the opportunity to observe him and his legendary muscles up close.

Some worry about this preponderance of new batpeople the way we worry about the woods around the city when the deer or bear populations rise.

Batfolks skulk and hide and do their work in secrecy. They have been accused of holding vigilante philosophies and using illegal work methods.

On the other hand, more of a unified bat culture could result in more communication among the heroes, and hopefully more accountability and moral fervor.

Unless bats just don’t swoop that way.

Inquiring readers—both of ’em—wanna know: What’s that infectious sample which leads off the Hugheses’ new single “Spruce Goose”? No sure we believe them, but the band says they wrote the riff all by themselves. That’s right—a self-sample! Which begs a question. To put it charitably, “Spruce Goose” doesn’t hang together all that well as a complete melodic-type song. Why didn’t The Hugheses flesh out the sample and put that instead of this mishmash?

And the reply is what you might expect. “Well, we couldn’t finish that song, but we really liked the riff and the drum fill. It came together in the studio,” agree the Hughes twins Irving and Clifford. Or came apart, you could say. The Hugheses explain themselves further on college radio (you know which one) tonight at 7 p.m. Listen in—we hear they’re enjoying dark studios so much that they may never play out live again.

Robard, The Outlaw Bra and Humble Birthplace tonight at Hamilton’s for a frat nite of sorts… The Bullfinch has Stone Gano, Two Arabian Knights and The Racket—one, two and three-piecers respectively… For a chance, the big excitement is over at Dollaire’s for Floyd Odlum’s Atlas, featuring a whole rhythm section of local boys made good, namely Billie Durkin and Neil McCarthy. That band’s got its fortune made, and is currently touring by plane just ’cause they can. Focke-Wulf, a side project featuring much of the FOA team,  opens…

The Play That Changed My Life,—America’s Foremost Playwrights on the Plays That Influenced Them (Applause Books, 2009)

This one’s a year old, but a real perennial since it makes such a good gift book.

Connecticut theatergoers will appreciate the East Coast bias of this collection of short essays by selected theater writers who aren’t hesitant to say that they were influenced by others, and who for the most part seem proud to be part of a distinct theater tradition and heritage. So many writers put on the loner/maverick/prodigy masks that it’s nice to see a whole pack of ’em celebrating traditions and rituals.

Many of the participants are familiar from productions hereabouts—Paula Vogel, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl, Horton Foote, Regina Taylor. A few, including Christopher Durang, David Ives and Lynn Nottage, studied at Yale. One—Pulitzer-winner Donald Margulies—even lives in New Haven. Margulies, whose breakthrough play was The Loman Family Picnic, unsurprisingly picks Death of a Salesman as his answer to the book’s titular query. Other writers are less obvious—in an opening epigraph at odd with the longer essays which the book solicited from others, Edward Albee cites the elephantine Rodgers/Hart/Hecht/MacArthur musical Jumbo as an inspiration (for Zoo Story?).

You’ll plow through this in one swell evening, but then you’ll be gathering up all the classics it mentions and poring through that stack for months to come.