Naked Lunch: The Musical

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Naked Lunch: The Musical

The Electric Lodge, Los Angeles, CA, October 22, 2016

Reviewed by Victoria Ordin for Cabaret Scenes

naked-lunch-the-musical-cabaret-scenes-magazine_212One would be hard-pressed to find a 20th century novel less obviously suited for musical adaptation than William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. But that didn’t stop Yale classmates William Hannay (book and lyrics) and Damon Baker (music) from writing a clever, consistently funny musical about the controversy and litigation surrounding Burroughs’ allegedly obscene book. With seven of their talented friends from the class of ’66, Hannay and Baker revived the play at the 50th reunion this past May at Sprague Hall. Encouraged by the enthusiastic response, the cast brought the show to The Electric Lodge in Los Angeles (thanks to a classmate’s generous gift), and the result was anything but naked.
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Naked Lunch: The Musical begins in the author’s Tangiers apartment in 1959, the year of the book’s publication. With Don Copley’s fine saxophone and Michael Grady’s excellent piano setting the mood, we see a dapper Rich Look as Burroughs perched on a stool with a drink in hand as he runs through 20 or so years of dissolute personal history: Harvard, drugs, travel and writing. In a suit, tie and hat, the elegant Look does not fit one’s image of a beatnik or a rebel. Only his mischievous smile and irreverence betray him.

The American publisher (Doug Knott) isn’t interested in Burroughs’ non-linear, profane vignettes.
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“Booze and tobacco are fine,” but not drugs. “Don’t Call Me, I’ll Call You” is not the show’s strongest number, but includes this gem: “Judges know it when they see it/No need to Ph.D. it.” Bret Patterson as the flamboyant French publisher motivated solely by profit, is entertaining in “Be Obscene and Not Heard” (particularly since the actor was a last-minute replacement for an ailing classmate).

The balance of the show takes place in a Boston courtroom after the book was banned in Boston and Los Angeles and pulled from the shelves of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library. It never made it onto the shelves of Harvard’s Widener, we learn, in the evening’s second dig at Yale’s rival.

Chris Bonno, a comedian and voice actor currently appearing on Fake Radio Players, dazzles as the prosecutor. His facial expressions and body language have the audience laughing before he utters a word or sings “The Prosecutor’s Tango,” one of the show’s musical highlights. Full of faux outrage you almost believe, the commanding Bonno cross-examines witnesses with a booming voice.

The first two witnesses (not in the original production, as Yale College did not admit women until the 1970s) are both positively scandalized by Naked Lunch. Mrs. Cabot-Lowell (Joanna Ceciliani) testifies as a devout Christian who has devoted her life to promoting temperance and sexual abstinence. An opera singer who toured internationally for 18 years and performed in over 80 operas in Portland, Ceciliani sings “Stand Up for Standards” with hilarious, if misplaced, conviction.

As if to underscore that young women are as horrified by Burroughs’ language and subject as women in their 60s, Bonno introduces Miss Debbie Dewey, a young and beautiful brunette librarian who can hardly contain her tears as she recalls the trauma of reading another “naughty book,” Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The trauma, of course, is the awakening of unwanted sexual feelings that recur every time she sees a limousine driver.
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The horror! A strong soprano and actor who also performs with Fake Radio, Colleen O’Shaughnessey is delightful in the well-written “Naughty Books.”

The next four witnesses—Jack Kerouac (Terry Mullin), Allen Ginsberg (Jeff Hill), Norman Mailer (Peter Lownds) and John Ciardi (John Carney)—testify on behalf of their friend and fellow author. Only Lownds acted after Yale, but the amateur actors bring these august literary figures to life. Lownds, who sang with a New York Gilbert and Sullivan troupe in the 1970s, infuses the beautifully written “My Name Is Norman Mailer” with all the curmudgeonliness one could wish for. Hill also stands out in “The Method Must Be,” another great song which includes a nice pairing of “reality” and “allegorically.” Carney’s voice is not as strong as his acting, but he conveys the gentle, soft-spoken manner of the famed professor and poet and offers the most substantive literary defense of Burroughs.

Hannay brings out the gravitas and good nature of one of America’s greatest First Amendment attorneys, Edward de Grazia, and plays well off the judge, played by real-life Chicago trial lawyer Jim Munson, who has appeared in repertory theater and commercials throughout his legal career. While clearly not sympathetic to Burroughs (or the case set forth by de Grazia), Munson maintains a disinterested, evenhanded presence from the bench, a kind of straight man to Bonno’s deliberately over-the-top prosecutor.

The judge finds for the prosecution, but Burroughs wins on appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court. By the play’s end, we feel invested in the outcome (even if we know how it turns out). The phone call from Kerouac’s New York apartment to Burroughs’ place in Tangiers brings the Naked Lunch saga—which began when these actors were freshmen and ended when they were seniors—to a close. Look, who is more bemused than agitated by the response to his book, sings “What Is Sex?” with the charm he exhibits throughout.
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With the advent of free internet porn, the brouhaha over Naked Lunch seems anachronistic, if not downright silly. Much of the outrage centered on the book’s profane language (234 bad words in 235 pages) rather than its admittedly graphic content. But the First Amendment questions raised by the musical are timeless.
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And the quality of Hannah’s lyrics (set to Baker’s beautiful melodies), which have a Gilbert and Sullivan feel, makes one nostalgic for a time language mattered both to lyricists and society at large.

My Fair Lady was still on Broadway in 1959, the year Burroughs published Naked Lunch. Henry Higgins would have found Burroughs’ book deplorable, but I think Lerner and Loewe would have approved of Naked Lunch: The Musical. The lyricist who gave us “Why Can’t the English?” cared about linguistic standards, which they linked to larger social and moral questions: “It’s ‘ow’ and ‘gaawne’ that keep her in her place/Not her wretched clothes and dirty face.” The sentiment is, of course, Shaw’s, but Lerner and Loewe gave it new life. And while Burroughs surely defied literary convention, he would not have garnered the support of fellow writers (or been subsequently vindicated by critics and literary historians) had he rejected the very idea of standards. How we speak reflects how we think: the real threat isn’t scandalous content, but the loss of the link between thought and articulation. That is the moral of Naked Lunch: The Musical, at least to this Gen X writer appalled by the sheer quantity of poor writing on and off the internet.