Musical Fire

MAR 24 TO APR 19,2008

The Canadian Stage Company
Written by Paul Ledoux and David Young.
Director : James MacDonald
Music Director: TED DYKSTRA.

ALL-CONSUMING FIRE < BY RIC KNOWLES >
ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WERE TWO MUSICAL COUSINS whose middle names were Lee and they were very, very naughty. The first was rock-and-roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis. Lewis married six times, the first time at age sixteen, sometimes remarrying before his (four) divorces were finalized. His third marriage was to his thirteen-year-old first cousin, and two of his wives died in circumstances some have called suspicious. He drank copiciously, used prodigious amounts of drugs, once shot his bass player, is remoured to have set fire to his song, " Great Balls of Fire!," and he saw himself as an agent of the devil.

The second cousin, Jimmy ( Lee ) Swaggart, also a gifted musician, was a famous televangelist who saw himself as an agent of the Lord. His righteous multi-million-dollar ministry moved him to expose and denounce his rival preachers Marvin Gorman and Jim Bakker as fornicators because of their sexual trangressions. He called Bakker a "cancer on the body of Christ" on Larry King Live-before he himself was exposed as a lifelong pornography addict and a client of prostitutes whom, nevertherless, he denied actually having touched. Besides, as Swaggart told his flock, " The Lord told me it's flat none of your business."

In their rock and gospel musical inspired by the cousins ( here brothers ), Paul Ledoux and David Young avoid the most sensational details of their linked lives. They focus rather in the element, beyond blood, that binds them together:fire! Early in the play Miss Molly - a composite character loosely based on Lewis's and Swaggart's child birdes- read the biblical passage, " Our God is a consuming fire. " The Reverend Blackwell, meanwhile, warns of "hell fire....that blistering inferno of everlastin' boiling flesh "from which only the "sacred fire of the Holy Ghost himself" can save us. Soon after, Molly is burning with a not-so-very-different passion when Cale ( aka Lewis ) turns gospel songs into "the devil's mucsic" in the church itself, and Molly, dancing,gets "the devil in her eyes."

It is Ledoux and Young's achievement to make graphic the fact that the two cousins were "in the same line of ecstasy production," as Swaggart's boigrapher argues. The "whole lotta shakin" going on" in the honky tonks of Lewis's south, in fact, was a lot like the rapture of the revivalists:both were driven by a powerful, hypnotic eroticism. As the radio producer tells Herchel ( aka Swaggart ), "people tune in for preachin' - hot preachin', so if you've got a pecker you get it up." The first act ends with a powerful rendition of "Good Goly miss Molly" introduced by the brother's parallel "LET US PRAY!!!/LET US ROCK."

Paul Ledoux and David Young bring their own considerable power and passion to the cpllaboration that produced Fire. Young is a well known novelist and playwright, author, notably, of Glenn, a complex drama based on the life of pianist Glenn Gould, and Inexpressible Island, based on the ill-fated expedition accompanying "Scott of the Antarctic." Ledoux is Canada's one-man musical theatre machine, having had 37 musicals produced in Canada and abroad, including Dream a Little Dream ( with Denny Doherty ) and Cheatin' Hearts ( with David Smyth ). Together Ledoux and Young created the provocative Love is Strange based on the stalking of Canadian country star Anne Murray by an obsessed fan, and Fire, which won no less than four Dora Mavor Moore Awards when it was first produced, as well as the Chalmers./
Toronto Drama Bench Award.

Fire is more than just a riff - to great music - on the lives of a couple of fallen American icons. It also touches on the appropriatio and perversion of Black music and Black religion by southern whites in the 1950s who were "afraid." and channeled that fear into a certain kind of racist ecstasy inn defense of "all that is decent and gallant in white Southern manhood." As the reverend Blackwell says.

" You don't need to be afraid of no Negroes.
You don't need to be afraid of no communists.
You don't need to be afraid of no radioactive cloud.
Brothers and Sisters, all you need to be afraid of is the righteous anger of God! For out God is a consuming fire!"

Through the character of Molly the play also touches on the position of women - neglected, disempowered, and viciously abused - in a culture that was and remains overwhelmingly patriarchal. And finally, Fire concerns itself directly with a hot topic in the warning months of the Bush administration's hold on power south of the border:the relationship between politics and religious fundamentalism. While Molly searches for love in St.Paul's famous epistle to the Corinthians, her husband sinks into, not sexual, but political corruption, as he uses his pulpit opportunistically to spread lies about political opponents."Sick," as he says,"of evolution....of secular humanism...of homosexuality," and convinced that "the lranians [are] building the bomb [ and ] the Jews....have it already," Herschel supports a platform of sending Christian men to washington and buying "warheads for jesus." All-consuming Fire indeed.

RICK Knowles is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph and Editor of Canadian Theartre Review.

이 뮤지컬은 피터가 보러가자고 해서 가게되었다. 이뮤지컬의 주인공이 보여주는 현란한 피아노연주와 락싱어송까지....정말 대단한 사람이라는 생각이 들었다. 앞줄에서 서너번쩨에 앉아서 보았는데도 사실 얼굴을 제대로 분간할만큼 보지는 못했지만....남자주인공이 멋있다.
노래잘하지, 피아노연주하는 무대도 가히일품이다, 두 손과 발..온몸으로 보여주는 열광적인 연주와 노래하는모습...정말 볼만한 연주이다.

줄 거리는 목사집의 두아들이 성장하는 이야기로 시작하는데, 한명은 성경책을 끼고 사는 기독교적인 사람으로 자라서 목사가 되고, 다른형제는 찬송가와는 거리가 먼 대중적인 락스타가 된다. 락스타는 마약에 중독되고, 이혼하고 결혼하고를 반복하는동안, 목사가된 다른 형제는 라디오방송으로 설교를 하는사람이 되고, 그리고 그방송 설교를 이용해서 미국정치판에 보수적인 목사의 의견을 따르는 사람에게 투표하도록 하는 선동을 해서, 미국의 현재 정치판이 기독교정치판이 되게만들지만, 정작 그의 다른형제가 다시 집으로 돌아와서 교회에 나오려고 하자, 그것을 받아들이지 않는 ....상당이 정치적인 목사의 모습을 보여주게 된다.

이뮤지컬은 현재 미국의 정치판이 왜 기독교와 같이 걸어가게 되는지....그래서 기독교의 배경이 어떻게 사람들을 조정하고 정치판에 개입하는지 그런점들에 대한 생각을 보여준다.