June 2- 8, 2005

art

Nowhere Man

AT THE DEPOT: (L-R) Actors Ned Eisenberg (The Salesman), Autumn Hurlbert (The Girl) and Denver Andre Taylor (The G.I.) rehearse a scene from The Middle of Nowhere at the Prince Music Theater. Photo By: Mike Mergen

Soldiers, salesmen, mothers: The Prince dissects American life through the songs of Randy Newman.

by Michael Pelusi

When he's not penning film scores or serving as the subject of parody on Family Guy, Randy Newman is perhaps the country's premier singer-songwriter-satirist.

Seriously.

For some, Newman's name is cause for groans — inspired by the umpteenth Oscar-night performance of "If I Didn't Have a Friend to Smile at a Fool in Love." But there are those who cherish the dozen or so albums Newman has released in his own name, with their bitterly funny but moving excavations of classic American creeps. These are the people who can while away an evening contemplating the subtext of a Newman lyric like, "They found out about my sister/ Kicked me out of the Navy." Perhaps predictably, these individuals are in dwindling supply nowadays.

But the Prince Music Theater is doing its part. On June 4, their revival of the 1988 Newman revue, The Middle of Nowhere, opens. And it's clear that they're not doing it because of his Meet the Parents score.

Marjorie Samoff, the Prince's producing artistic director, is an avowed "lifelong Randy Newman fan." She says, "I think his genius lies in his ability to get inside the skins of unlovables, outsiders, misfits, oddballs: people that if you passed them in the street you would either not notice or you might have contempt for them. And because he's fearless — I love that about him, he's utterly fearless — and he's so smart, he writes these lyrics and you suddenly start to think and you discover their humanity."

Samoff was initially interested in having the Prince put on The Education of Randy Newman, a revue Newman himself had helped develop in 2000. This would have opened the chance of Newman becoming involved in the Prince's production. However, it became apparent that Education still had some kinks — chief among them its attempt to tell Newman's life story through his songs, even though the majority of those songs are resolute character pieces, as far from autobiography as possible. "We at the Prince just this year didn't feel we had the resources to support the solution of those questions of how to make this all work," Samoff says.

But when she discovered The Middle of Nowhere, originally an off-Broadway production written by Tracy Friedman, Samoff "felt that this was something that we could do." The piece takes place in 1969, at a Louisiana bus depot, where five strangers — a soldier, a salesman, a good ol' boy, a wayward girl and a janitor — are stuck during a thunderstorm. "It reminds me of the oldest conceit of The Canterbury Tales: five people stuck in an inn and they amuse themselves by telling stories," says Samoff.

As realized in this production by director-choreographer John Ruocco, the storytelling manifests in the form of a minstrel show, as the characters perform Newman songs such as "I Think It's Going to Rain Today," "Sail Away" and, yes, "Short People." According to Samoff, Ruocco has "done a brilliant conceptual gambit. You don't really know why [these people are] there, but they're actually dealing with some internal demon, each of them. And the Randy Newman songs are all about that."

Through the minstrel-show setting, Ruocco aims to address classic American themes of racism and complacency. Partially of Southern heritage, Newman has grappled with the region's pride and prejudice numerous times, perhaps most notably on his 1974 masterwork, Good Old Boys. "The minstrelsy to Randy Newman is a very familiar, primal thing, being a man of the South," Ruocco says. "But he's also a man of Hollywood and a man of money. His experiences of his childhood in California bring around the cynicism, the commercialism, the politics. So in a way, you can't separate Randy Newman from this structure. Every idea is very specific to his experience and his point of view. My job is to open that point of view up to five different people from five different places, to try to give it to you from every angle and from every side, and then leave the audience to make their own decisions."

Part of the challenge is adapting Newman's inimitable songs to other voices. While a technically limited singer, Newman possesses an unparalleled knack for embodying his songs' disparate characters using word choice and vocal inflections. Ruocco says, "I wasn't really interested in the typical Broadway singer; somebody with a fantastic instrument who can do all sorts of vocal tricks and bring a certain vocal expertise to their work. That's not his voice. So when I cast this, I cast actors. Actors who can sing."

The cast includes Jeffery V. Thompson, who appeared in the Prince's It Ain't Nothin' But the Blues, and film and television actor Ned Eisenberg (Million Dollar Baby). "They're not doing vocal trickery, putting on," says Ruocco. "If anything, it's about stripping down and getting to the core of the human voice. Which is the experience you have when you listen to Randy Newman."

The play's musical director, Charles Gilbert, says, "There is a kind of unaffected quality that all of these singers need to have because Randy's own personal voice is unaffected, very direct and has a roots quality to it, rooted in blues and old styles of music. The interesting challenge is trying to find arrangements and settings that will really show off those distinct qualities."

Regarding her ultimate aims for this production, Samoff says, "Every time I listen [to Newman's songs] I get new things about them. And nobody does that much anymore. We're in the world of the instant message; subtlety and layers are not always valued. From a musical standpoint, I want to give a theatrical life to the songs, and from a human standpoint I want to share Randy Newman's insights into these unique characters, each of whom is part of the American landscape."