New York minutes: A decade late, The Capeman flies
BAM Harvey's spare stage has brought Paul Simon's expensive flop to life at last
Ed Pilkington
April 2, 2008 4:45 PM | Printable version
Paul Simon
Paul Simon had to wait 10 years for vindication and when it came, on Tuesday night at a theatre in Brooklyn, boy, was it sweet. A packed audience at the BAM Harvey theatre gave him a standing ovation for a performance of his songs from his musical The Capeman.
What a contrast to the reception Simon received in 1998, when he staged the musical on Broadway. For months before the show opened there were grumblings in the press about the $11m - a huge amount for that time - that was being lavished on the production. Groups representing the families of crime victims launched a public campaign against the show, claiming that its theme - more of which in a minute - glorified violence.
So even before the first night curtain was raised things were looking shaky. Then the reviews hit, tearing the production to shreads. The New York Times likened it to watching a "mortally wounded animal. You're only sorry that it has to suffer." It didn't suffer for long: The Capeman was pulled from the stage after less than three months, making it the then most expensive flop in Broadway history.
So how to explain this week's rapturously-received revival at the start of a season of BAM performances devoted to the work of Simon? The first point to make is that The Capeman wasn't natural Broadway fare. The focus of the show is a Puerto Rican teenager from a gang in Manhattan's Upper West Side who became a bogey figure in 1959 when he killed two white boys and bragged to the press: "I don't care if I burn. My mother could watch me."
And if the choice of subject matter wasn't enough - Salvador Agron, a sweet-faced but deeply troubled 16 year old nicknamed for the black and red cape he wore - Simon and his co-lyricist, the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, insisted on treating the story in all its complexity. They set out to try and understand what led Agron into a life of violence in the first place, then explored his experiences in prison and his eventual rehabilitation. Lines such as: "The politics of the prison are a mirror of the state / The poor control the prison, the police control the state" are hardly mass-market fodder. You don't find discourses on the economics of gang behaviour in Andrew Lloyd Webber.
What got lost in the opprobrium heaped on The Capeman was the brilliance of the music. Like his better known work with African musicians in Graceland, Simon appropriates Puerto Rican and Cuban music and makes them his own, combining it with the 1950s doo-wop beat in a clever interplay between Latin and American pop sounds of the time.
Paring the performance down to suit the sparse setting of the Harvey theatre, with no pretensions to Broadway grandeur, allowed the music to soar unimpeded. And soar it did, played superbly by the Spanish Harlem Orchestra. Paul Simon certainly knows how to manipulate a crowd, moving from rousing choruses to intimate ballads and back again with ease.
Simon made personal appearances in the finale and in one earlier song, in which he depicted Agron's journey across America after his release from jail - a wonderful slide from rock, through country and western, into Latin rythms, as if the bus and the music were travelling as one. Simon looks old these days, with wispy grey hair, but his voice is as sweet as it was in the days of Garfunkel.
· Songs from the Capeman is at the BAM Harvey Theatre in Brooklyn until April 6. A series on Paul Simon's African music, Under African Skies, runs from April 10-13 at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House; his American Tunes is at the same venue between April 23-27.
