PROMO VIDEO FOR DAVID T. LITTLE’S SOLDIER SONGS
The songs, I like. The soldier part I’m still wrestling with.
Since both shows have classical elements and war themes, it’s hard not to compare David T. Little’s Soldier Songs (which I saw in its final Arts & Ideas performance, 5 p.m. June 25) with Bill T. Jones’ luminous meditation on the American Civil War, Serenade/The Proposition (which I saw just 21 hours earlier, at its A&I debut).
Where Serenade/The Proposition is sprightly and purposefully sparse, Soldier Songs was heavy-handed and laden with overblown special effects. Where S/P avoids most of the clichés associated with war shows, SS embraces seemingly all of them.
Granted, the difference is inherent in the show’s very titles: one’s a serenade, the other’s a soldier song. But I felt deeply moved by Jones’ work while Little’s (as directed by Yuval Sharon and performed by David Adam Moore) was coarse and crass and obvious. In this multi-styled song cycle, war is depicted with blinding lights, splashes of blood, and loud, chaotic noises. Maybe this would be an effective technique if we hadn’t become immune to that sort of overkill through a century of garish war movies and video games.
Soldier Songs makes that exact point—that people join the army with false hopes of heroism and adventure, when the reality can be much different. At one point Moore screams “Someone yell ‘Cut’! Someone yell ‘Cut!” But Soldier Songs’ own staging isn’t far removed from Hollywood extremism, more sensationalistic than sensitive.
DAVID ADAM MOORE, NAKED AND BLOODSOAKED IN SOLDIER SONGS.
The other actor/singer in the show besides Moore is Sam Poon as “boy”—a child whose initial experience of war is imaginative playground games. Soldier Songs gets pretty imaginative itself—a seesaw, behind a shadow screen, looks like a cannon, and Moore undergoes some quick costume changes under cover of darkness—but these moments start to come off as gimmicky. Amid all the blood and craziness, attempts at satire (a veteran’s memorial wall which reads “What’sHisName, What’sHerName, What’sHisName, What’sHerName”) fall flat.
This small-seeming show has operatic ambitions, but that doesn’t excuse its overwrought imagery. Little’s score is propulsive and unsettling, veering from minimalism to a bass-heavy hard rock vibe to, well, vibes. It’s bracing to hear this complex composition played live by the adventurous eight-piece band Newspeak rather than pre-recorded. Stylistic changes are achieved through clever repurposing of instruments—violins are plucked, xylophones pinged, keyboards banged. I’d love to hear the score on its own. Its subtleties are washed out by the visual bombast of Moore’s unrestrained theatrics. Rather than a deep rumble of anti-war anguish, Soldier Songs is a simplistic shocker.
Soldier Songs had its final performance at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas on June 25. The piece was reorchestrated for this festival. No future performances are currently listed on David T. Little’s website.