More Rock Bands Named After Plays

1. Dear Brutus: danceable modern rock band with punk roots from Manchester and Sheffield, England. The play Dear Brutus is a fantasy comedy by J.M. Barrie, a romance in which stuck-in-their-ways characters are offered alternative existences for a night. Much cooler than A Little Night Music/Smiles of a Summer Night.

2. Faust. I feel I should leave them off the list, since Goethe’s Faust (as distinct from Marlowe’s The Tragical Hisory of Doctor Faustus—very different title) isn’t really staged as a play; it’s a gushy epic poem in dialogue form. On the other hand, there have been several adaptations of the grandiose Goethe opus into opera (Gounod, Berlioz) or rock opera (Randy Newman) forms. Above all else, Faust the band is one of my favorite rock acts of all time. They released half a dozen exception experimental-rock records in the early 1970s and in the ‘90s regrouped as two separate bands that are both worth keeping up with.

3. Peer Gynt. Considering the soul-searching that goes on in Ibsen’s play, this is an alarmingly mainstream, commercial rock act. Videos and band photos feature gratuitous scantily-clad women and flaming guitars. At least the band actually does hail from Norway—where the Peer Gynt legend is not just known from Ibsen’s take on it, and where a flaming guitar might come in handy when it’s 40 degrees below