Having toured this show over the course of a decade, why do you find so much pleasure in coming back to it?
I do the show because I love doing it. I love the struggle of this absurd character and I love singing these Kurt Weill songs.
I wrote Whiskey Bars over one long weekend in 2000. I wanted something quick and easy - a dramatic format to present a group of Kurt Weill songs. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I’d still be doing the show 10 years later.
I’m still doing it for several reasons. First, it proved more popular than I could ever have imagined and so it has a reason to stay alive – i.e. audiences still respond to the struggle of this vain, pretentious, proud, wounded, talented, touchy, almost ridiculous character. Second, it has evolved a long way from that first presentation – everything changed: the script, the songs, the accompaniment, the drama. I worked with dramaturges, choreographers, directors, friends. They all added in some way to the show and it slowly grew.
Finally, the show is hard to do, and that makes it very satisfying. It’s never, ever easy. – the songs are masterpieces of musical theatre writing and I feel an immense responsibility to make the most of them, and the character sits on a knife edge of total failure and success. His plunging elations and doubts and depressions and enthusiasms are always tricky to navigate on stage. When it works it’s totally exhausting and totally satisfying.
Whiskey Bars features an unnamed character only known as The Performer, an aspiring hockey player who gave it all up for show biz. How do you describe his addiction to greatness?
His addiction is the same one that you see with every performer. He’s a caricature, but his joys and hopes and fears are pretty much what you see in any dressing room.
We’re in a strange business where the work and rewards and the job satisfaction are often ephemeral and insubstantial. People work all their life in theatre for tiny financial rewards. There are only a very few people who get to be the Brad Pitts and George Clooneys but most arts workers work incredibly hard to create the things they love and believe in, whether its music or theatre or dance or paintings, and receive tiny rewards. I’ve never met that stereotype of the ‘lazy artist’. I think most artists (and the performer in Whiskey Bars) have a dream of stardom, but would really be delighted and content with the opportunity to make a living, and the possibility of just continuing to do the work.
So, he dreams of greatness, but if you scratched the surface of that dream, it might end up simply looking like a chance to perform again tomorrow night, and the night after that, and the night after that. To keep on doing what he loves. His fear is mostly that this might be the last night he gets to do that.
The character is partial to having a stiff drink before his cabaret act to calm his pre-show jitters. At one point, he admits being terrified to sing. What is the back story to his insecurity?
Well, I have to admit having some slight insecurities about being on stage and the constant wonder if my skills and talents will match up to my ambitions. But I think that I bubble along at the relatively normal high level of doubt (I was once much reassured by the knowledge that both Peter Fonda and Sarah Bernhardt could be found before each performance throwing up in the dressing room toilet).
I personally remember a cellist friend who would have to drink most of a bottle of vodka before getting on stage and playing superbly. I sang with an opera singer once and we had to physically pick her up offstage and throw her on as the orchestra approached her cue. She would sing like an angel, make her exit to a standing ovation and then collapse sobbing onto the floor in the wings.
Apparently the physical sensations as a performer waits to make their entrance are very similar to those of a person having a heart attack. Just to get on stage you have to navigate your way through these physical and mental roadblocks.
But most of all, I wanted to write about the fact that this thing that he does on stage – singing the music he loves - is the thing he loves most in the world and he desperately wants to do it well and do it justice, and I think that is what terrifies him most of all, that he might fail himself and the music. Sometimes the thing you love most of all is the hardest thing to confront.
Having done the show so many times, do you see The Performer differently now than when you first created him?
When I wrote him he was much more of a goofball character. Well, now I’m ten years on in my career and in my life, so oddly some of the lines I wrote as jokes have come to be much more personal.
When he speaks about growing older and wondering why he continues to do this, sometimes I ask myself that. I guess I have a lot more sympathy for him and take him a lot more seriously than I used to.
And he’s producing his own ‘comeback’. Most of the productions of Whiskey Bars are situations I’ve set up myself, so when I walk on stage I have a lot of sympathy for his plight.
This offering is a salute to musical composer Kurt Weill in which you sing 10 of the songs that he made famous. The Performer lashes out at the reviewer asking him, “Do you even know who Kurt Weill was?” Has the German born entertainer secured his rightful place in musical history?
Weill struggled all his life do find ways to do his work. It was never easy for him. But he was one of these talented individuals who didn’t fit nicely into a niche so perhaps he doesn’t really have a ‘rightful place’.
He wrote huge classical works – operas, oratorios, and yet he loved music that appealed to the masses, and he deeply believed in issues of social and moral justice. He defined himself as a secular German Jew, but his music was chosen by the Nazi’s for particular persecution (when the Nazi’s set up their exhibition of ‘Decadent Art’ to show how disgusting was the work of people they classified as ‘subhuman’, they set up a special room where Weill’s music was played – it proved so popular that it had to be closed down).
He is now mostly remembered for a few standards like September Song, Mack the Knife, or Speak Low, and also for a few of his early German works like Three Penny Opera and the Rise and Fall of the city of Mahagonny. Yet, after running from the Nazis and after a difficult time trying to work in Hollywood, his first real American successes, ‘Johnny Johnson’ and ‘Lady in the Dark’, revolutionized musical theatre.
In Whiskey Bars I pull songs from across his career and I love the evolution in his work and the sense of the same brilliant hand behind all the different styles.
Playgoers are more familiar with songs such as ‘Moon Faced, Starry Eyed’ and ‘Mack The Knife’ that accent the show nicely. Which musical number do you find the most joy in performing?
I love all the songs, I couldn’t keep on doing them if I didn’t adore them.
When I pick the show up after a year of not performing it, I get a great sense of excitement about returning to work on these songs. They are complex and frank and straightforward and multi-leveled. I’m still finding out things about them.
If I had to pick a favorite, I’d say Speak Low (with lyrics by Ogden Nash). It’s usually performed as a slightly up-tempo, tongue-in-cheek song. I chose to take it the other way and slow it down. A couple of weeks ago in the middle of the song something about the lyrics and music hit me and I realized that this is possibly the saddest song I will ever sing.
