Con-Man: The Musical
CON-MAN RECEIVES PROFESSIONAL NEW YORK READING
Con Man: The Musical received its first professional reading at the Tisch School of Drama at NYU. Produced by NYC’s Riverside Opera Ensemble, with Stephen Pickover, Director and Nathan Matthews, Musical Director, the reading was a raging success.
The “music was beautiful, in fact incredible,”
noted a Broadway veteran in his written comments. The cast and audience
of theatrical and musical professionals provided additional praise for
the project:
“Music which is not only great but DRIVES the story.”
“’I Remember When’ made me cry.”
“What a wonderful picture is presented of a time in history; the
issues addressed are broad and narrow—slavery, women’s rights,
child abuse, family relationship, politics etc.”
“The whole time I was listening, I could see all the wonderful stage
wizardry going on all around. That's some GOOD writing.
You truly sparked my imagination and that's the point.”
“The whole work and its central theme of the longing and need that
permit us to be manipulated is great, powerful.”
According to Keith Butterbaugh, who convincingly played the Con Man (even
though he suffered a corneal abrasion the second night!):
The last time I had a role like this was Phantom —both in
terms of the emotional makeup of the character –
which is so wide you can go anywhere as an actor –
and in terms of the musical range and depth of
expression that comes to the character through
the music.
NEW! LISTEN TO THE MUSIC
I Remember When ~ Lamentation of lost childhood. (3:01)
Today's the Day MAIN THEME ~ Intro to enigmatic Con Man and three refuges. (3:00)
Today's The Day INTERLUDE ~ Can Con Man be trusted? (:59)
Voyage Into Light, EXCERPT 1 (1:49) and EXCERPT 2 (1:23)
Passengers board a riverboat, unaware they are heading toward Apocalypse.
Dream Lover ~ He loves her, but she doesn't love him. (1:57)
A Star's Exploding ~ An escaped slave and an abused boy ponder life. From CSUF recording, Kevin O'Dell and Geoffrey Friedly (3:16)
The School of Hard Knocks ~ How women survive. (2:16)
The Price of Vice ~ The Con Man (in drag!) seduces a male senator. (1:31)
Ballad of the Unfortunate Man ~ The Con Man (as a preacher) sings of his wife's cheating. NOT a love song! (2:47)
The Genesis of CON MAN: THE MUSICAL
How did I get involved in this project? Well, it’s a family affair! In 1998, while I was in Paris on a tour with the TransAtlantic Reed-String Project, I rendezvoused with my older brother – Joseph Boone, a writer and scholar – who was returning from a Rockefeller Fellowship at Bellagio, Italy. While there, he began work on what he described as “a highly creative new work for music theater inspired by the Herman Melville novel, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade.” As he opened a folder to show me the script, the hotel fire alarm went off and out we rushed. As we read the script at a nearby café over the screeching of sirens, one line particularly struck me, “The price of vice is very nice.” I sketched out a melody and premiered it that night at a performance in the Latin Quarter. It was a hit! What a scene: 100 French audience members singing “The price of vice” and dancing under the stars!
Since that time, Joe and I received a residency at the Fundación Valparaíso (Spain) to begin work on the musical book, as well as grants from California State University Fresno for music workshopping and readings. What’s next? We are re-working the script with dramaturg Robert Vorlicky and hope to workshop the piece at a regional theater or university.
CON-MAN Project Synopsis
Composer and Lyricist: Benjamin V. Boone
Librettist and Lyricist: Joseph A. Boone
The first professional staged reading with music was produced by the Riverside Opera Ensemble at the Tisch School of Drama at NYU, January 16-17, 2004.
I. Synopsis
April Fools Day, 1860. At sunrise a mysterious stranger boards the riverboat Fidele heading south on the Mississippi. As the steamer glides ominously from “free” states to slave territories freighted with passengers representing America on the brink of civil war, the stranger—the nameless Con-Man—assumes a series of elaborate disguises that, in duping his fellow-passengers, illustrate the truth of P. T. Barnam’s quip that “a sucker’s born every minute” in 19th century America.
Transforming from blind prophet to black cripple to brazen hussy, Con-Man’s heady exercise of theatrical illusion and will-to-power transfixes, entertains, and seduces us along with the boat’s passengers. Gradually, however, his con-games reveal a larger master plan, one that involves three stowaways, their pursuers, and larger questions of life and death, liberty and injustice. What ensues is comedy, confusion, terror, magic, and, finally, an apocalyptic series of revelations at midnight—the end of the voyage—that foreshadow a nation about to plunge into chaos of war and emerge from that conflict transformed (like Con-Man’s prey) forever.
This plot is inspired by Herman Melville’s last published novel, The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade, an imaginative evocation of a defining turning point in our nation’s history whose message seems more apt in our time than ever.
II. Theatrical Potential
This masterpiece of American literature is a superb vehicle for stage
adaptation, and especially for musical theater, for a number of reasons:
· Con-Man’s disguises offer a theatrical tour de force to the actor who portrays him.
· His exploits provide a incisive commentary on American democracy, uniting universal themes of nation, war, destiny, and leadership.
· The novel’s physical setting on a boat evokes a musical theater tradition ranging from Showboat to Titanic, just as its temporal evocation of historical America calls to mind musicals from Oklahoma to Ragtime.
· Given the historical association of “show” boats with spectacle, the setting immediately appeals to visual and the theatrical elements.
· Con-Man’s manipulations of reality and illusion are perfectly mirrored in a genre and aesthetic experience—theater—that depends on illusion and artifice.
· The plot observes the classical dramatic unities of time (one day), place (one boat), and action (one series of escalating cons).
III. Character Descriptions and General Structure
Much like Cabaret’s Emcee, Miss Saigon’s Engineer, and The Music Man’s title character, Con-Man is an omnipresent, morally ambivalent force who presides over the action of the entire play.
Switching from one disguise to the next, his designs give rise to and shape the script’s dramatic tensions, surprises, and revelations. Integral to his machinations are three subplots involving three individuals attempting to break free of oppressive situations: a runaway slave (Ebony), an abused boy (Billy), and a recent bride (Eva). Their situations give the drama its “heart” and suspense.
Three character groupings are central to these subplots:
· The comically bombastic Senator Bartleby Budd and his silently rebellious wife, who are searching for the Senator’s nephew Billy.
· An ailing, miserly plantation owner, Ebenezer Armistead, who with his Irish Overseer Flea is hunting down Ebony.
· Natty Goodman, in quest of his runaway wife Eva Brown, who is being aided by her Suffragist aunt, the Widow Fuller.
The audience learns that the Con-Man is involved in smuggling all three fugitives aboard the Fidele on the very day, April 1, that their pursuers have converged on the same riverboat in search of their prey. What isn’t yet apparent, however, is why he’s helping them. What Faustian bargain has been struck? Will he double-cross them? What role has he played in their pursuers turning up on the scene?
These dramatic tensions become central both to (1) the specific disguises the Con-Man assumes and (2) the various marks or victims on whom he sets his sights as the riverboat journeys begins. His cons quickly accrue dramatic urgency as part of a master-scheme that pivots on Billy, Eva, and Ebony, their quests for freedom, and their pursuers’ desires for revenge.
IV. Musical Elements
Con-Man’s investigation into the thin line separating truth from lies when the boundaries between reality and appearance begin to dissolve is highlighted by the changing identities of the Con-Man himself. But it is also integral to the composer’s conception and scoring of the music, expressly composed for this vehicle. Not only does the route of the Fidele down the Mississippi chart a journey into the heartland of American jazz and blues—an influence registered throughout the score—but music, like the Con-Man, can play tricks both subtle and obvious on its listeners; it, too, can reveal different “faces” and “disguise” itself (through shifts of key, tonality, dissonance, tempo, electronically altered sounds, instrumentation, improvisation). Moreover, through musical “citation” (of a Coltrane rhythm, for example) and “pastiche” (the incorporation of lines from other musicals), the score creates on an aural level—much as the script does on the textual level and the staging does on a visual level—a multilayered, self-referential world where art, theatricality, and politics intermix.
V. Status
The entire script has been completed and edited several times since its conception in June 1998 during the author’s residency on a Rockefeller Fellowship at Bellagio, Italy.
The majority of the score was written while the author and composer shared residencies, awarded specifically for this project, at the Foundacion Valparaiso, an artists’ retreat in Spain in May 2000.
During the summers of 2001 and 2002, the authors worked closely for two two-week sessions in New York City with Robert Vorlicky, a professor of dramatic arts at the Tisch School of the Performing Arts at NYU, to refine the overall libretto and score.
A musical reading was held in Los Angeles in September 2001. Two closed readings of the play with professional actors following, one in March 2002 and one in June 2002, in Los Angeles.
A professional reading with music (cast of 20, with Keith Butterbaugh taking the lead) was presented in New York City on the nights of January 16-17, 2004 by the Riverside Opera Company, following a two-week rehearsal period. Studio space was provided by the Tisch School of Drama at New York University. The creative team included Stephen Pickover, Director, Nathan Matthews, Music Director, and Robert Vorlicky, Dramaturg. Attendance was by invitation only, to full houses both nights, of theater professionals and associates, whose unanimous response was that the show is now ready for a workshop situation for final stages of development.
THE CAST
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