Return of the Capeman

Paul Simon’s ‘Capeman’ Stalks Another Chance

By LARRY ROHTER
Published: August 11, 2010

“The Capeman,” Paul Simon’s ill-fated foray into the Broadway musical, was so spectacular and costly a flop that when it closed in 1998 after only 68 performances, it was hard to imagine it could ever have an afterlife. But time passes, memories fade, and tastes change, and so for three nights beginning Saturday, the Public Theater will be presenting a new, streamlined version of the show outdoors at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.

The Public has been careful to keep expectations modest, referring to the performances as a “concert” or “workshop” that’s no more than a “fun way to end the summer.” But because the director chosen for the project, Diane Paulus, also mounted a revival of “Hair” for the Public Theater in Central Park in 2007 that eventually ended up on Broadway, there is already speculation that the Public may have similar aspirations for “The Capeman.”

“We are setting out to create a fantastic experience in the park this weekend, and we don’t need for it to do anything else,” the Public’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, said when asked about a next step for Mr. Simon’s work. “Obviously we hope that there is an ever-expanding audience for it. If we get something that works, our goal is to give it the broadest possible reach. So, sure, we hope this is a step that leads to a further life for this piece. But there is nothing in terms of specific. We literally don’t know what we have.”The rehabilitation of “The Capeman,” which lost an estimated $11 million on Broadway — said at the time to be a record — actually began two years ago, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As the first segment of a broader program devoted to Mr. Simon’s music, the academy’s executive producer, Joseph Melillo, focused on what had always been considered the musical’s strongest aspect — a collection of songs that drew on influences ranging from blues and doo-wop to Latin Caribbean styles like aguinaldos and guajiras — and simply jettisoned the rest.

“I wanted to be an exorcist,” Mr. Melillo said in an interview this week. “I wanted to help Paul, to get this demon out of him and onto the stage, where we could say, ‘Look everyone, this is great music.’”

This weekend’s performances, which will be free and run around 90 minutes each, take that process a step closer to a full staging. Parts of the book, written by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott, have been restored, but in a stripped-down and altered form, with nearly an hour of the original libretto eliminated.

“It’s almost like an oratorio now,” said Ms. Paulus, who remembers attending a preview of the original Broadway production and liking it. “There are a few vignettes of dialogue, mostly interpolated in the songs, but the power of the story and the transformations of the characters come from the cumulative power of the music.”

Mr. Eustis confessed that, unlike Ms. Paulus, he has never seen a live performance of “The Capeman.” His interest, he said, stems from his tenure at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., where he worked with Edgar Dobie, one of the producers of the Broadway version of the play and now managing director at Arena Stage in Washington.

“I knew that the show famously had not worked on Broadway,” Mr. Eustis said. “But I had listened to both the cast album and the album Paul Simon released and thought that the music was dramaturgically and sociologically brilliant, with the kind of insight you get on his great works like ‘Graceland.’ ”

It may also help that the theatrical landscape has altered somewhat since the debacle of “The Capeman.” The Afrobeat musical “Fela!,” with its distinct political theme, has been a recent critical hit on Broadway, winning three Tony awards, and is holding its own commercially. Mr. Eustis and Ms. Paulus also mentioned the success of “In the Heights” and “Passing Strange,” both shows that focus on the experience of minority groups, as indications that the boundaries of the genre have expanded.

But it is also clear that the team behind the new version of the play has tried to be more accommodating to what the public expects a musical to be, with the consent of Mr. Simon, who has been involved behind the scenes in the reshaping but declined a request for an interview.

The new version of “The Capeman” is thus more conventional, both in its story and the manner in which it is presented. For example, it eliminates video projections that appeared in the Broadway version in favor of live actors speaking some of the same lines.

“I think that what Paul did was great, creating a new approach to doing things within the format of the traditional musical so that it could be both entertaining and meaningful,” said the salsa singer and actor Rubén Blades, who played one of the lead roles in the original production. “But we had our problems. People were making choices, most of whom had not been involved before in a Broadway experience, which has a definite set of dos and don’ts. We didn’t consult the people who knew, and so we got killed.”

In the original staging, the main character was a real-life figure, Salvador Agron, who as a bitter teenager in 1959 murdered two members of a rival gang on a Hell’s Kitchen playground and later, in prison, learned to read, found God and died in 1986 a free man. The salsa star Marc Anthony played Agron as a teenager, and Mr. Blades played the repentant older man.But both critics and audiences seemed to find the character unsympathetic and the story too cluttered. “Irrevocable damage seems to have occurred with Mr. Simon’s and Mr. Walcott’s very conception of the show’s central character,” who “remains a blank passive figure, a tabula rasa scrawled upon by bad karma and a bad society,” Ben Brantley wrote in his New York Times review of the 1998 production. Protesters also picketed the show, accusing “The Capeman” of glorifying a killer.

Ms. Paulus has taken a different approach, carving out more space in the story for a more appealing figure: Agron’s long-suffering mother, Esmeralda, who will be played by Natascia Diaz. Anthony Lee Medina will play Agron as a teenager, and Iván Hernández will play him as an older man.

“I’ve tried to work on getting the piece to the essence, the heart of the story,” Ms. Paulus said. “The story is still about Salvador Agron, but I’ve been working with Paul over the last year to think about another doorway into the story, through the viewpoint of his mother.”

Besides Mr. Simon, a handful of performers have been involved with all three versions of “Capeman.” One of them is the salsa and jazz pianist Oscar Hernández, the show’s musical director, who said the music has also been tweaked to reflect the new focus.

“It’s not a major change, but kind of a revamping here and there of certain songs,” he said. “The songs are in a different sequence, and we’ve taken some out and added some that weren’t in the original show and done a few different edits, turning solos into duets and things like that, in the interest of shortening and tightening things.”

In addition the choreographer Sergio Trujillo, whose previous credits include “Jersey Boys,” “Memphis,” “The Addams Family” and “Guys and Dolls,” has been brought on board, part of an effort to give the play the “visceral physicality” that Ms. Paulus felt was lacking in the original version. As a result “there’s more dance, motion and movement” than before, Mr. Hernández said.

“In a perfect world ‘The Capeman’ would come back and be a huge success,” he added. “But for something that left such a bad taste in everyone’s mouth back then, being able to do this again, first at BAM and now at the Public, has been kind of redeeming, especially for Paul. We’re in a good place now.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/th...er/rssnyt?_r=1