A show titled “Revolution(s)” deserves a good quote from Karl Marx. But it’s telling that the line picked by Zayd Ayers Dohrn for the book for his striking new musical at the Goodman Theatre is this one: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”
Dohrn, the son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers (co-founders of the militant activist group Weather Underground), presumably knows whereof he speaks there, even if his famous parents are still very much alive. Not that many musicals have been written by a son of a woman who was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for years.
Attributing too much to biographical identity can be both inaccurate and unfair. But in this instance, Dohrn clearly is inviting the comparison. Emma, one of the major characters in his new musical, feels much like a tribute to Bernardine Dohrn, even if her partner Leon is, at first glance, very different from Ayers. Still, Emma and Leon’s son, Hampton, is named after the very man whose killing provoked the Weather Underground into declaring war on the U.S. government. And Hampton’s brother Ernie is pragmatic, artistic, sensitive, introverted and a family healer who loves his mom; surely someone with things in common with the writer himself.
Indeed, “Revolution(s)” (note the telling parenthetical plural) is a show that veers back and forth between paying tribute to the radical activists of Chicago’s past and probing their impact on a subsequent generation. What was that impact? Dohrn makes it very clear that the struggle is not yet won and, as the show screams in its final number: “You gotta stay steadfast / tread lightly / ‘Cause they’re looking for a reason to knock you down / But you can’t ask too politely. IN THE TRENCHES YOU GOTTA GET LOUD!”
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You would not be collaborating with Tom Morello, the renowned, massively innovative guitarist and the co-founder of the aptly named anti-authoritarian American rock band Rage Against the Machine, if you believed otherwise, of course. But even though the blame is placed mostly on the foot soldiers of the oppressors (cops, the military, the system), the most interesting theme of this arresting show (no pun intended) still is that the burden of the past weighs heavily on the young.
You should know this is hardly a typical level of production in the Goodman’s smaller Owen Theatre space. The New York and Chicago-based cast is stocked with Broadway veterans, including Jackie Burns, a renowned former Elphaba playing a very different role here, not to mention Aaron James Mckenzie, Jakeim Hart and the rising Alysia Velez. Steve H. Broadnax III directs the show with style and cred, evoking such prior rush-of-youth shows as “Rent” and “American Idiot.” Fans of Morello, who has been very much involved here, will have no problem with the rendering of his music, played mostly by a live band but also by some of the characters brandishing guitars and an ability to deliver what’s very difficult music to play while in the middle of the scene. From a staging point of view, the show, which is fabulously performed, felt to me strikingly finished and polished, which is unusual at this stage of development.
Well, with one exception. Musical theater with a heavy book demands that you can track the vast majority of the lyrics on one hearing, as all previous rockers have found out, sometimes to their cost. You simply cannot here, much of the time, and that’s obviously challenging given how Morello famously employed such genres as metal and punk, emphasizing the sensorial and the loud and letting fans figure out the lyrical intent.
Sure, works fine on an album. But in the theater, those songs have to drive the narrative and, by the way, the previously existing Morello catalog, with one full new song (“Untethered”), fresh arrangements and some other new and contemporaneously composed music, is very shrewdly integrated into the whole. Additional lyrics are credited to Boots Riley, Big Boi, Killer Mike, Knife Party, Grandson, Ryan Harvey, Matt Shultz, Chris Stapleton and Anne Preven, all reflective of Morello’s eclectic list of collaborators over the years.
Still, the score strikes me as overly thrashy for a relatively complex narrative, where characters have to use songs to make decisions and audiences look to them to know where they are in the story. There are emo-like deviations, as fans of this man’s music will expect and the edginess certainly is authentically needed; heck, the rock-out final number is gonzo. Nonetheless, the balance needs serious attention. All successful musicals are generous to the musical tastes of their audiences. The racial aspects of the show also are interesting: the characters are mostly Black but the writer is white. Emphasizing more of Morello’s hip hop collaborations with Black artists would to my mind make sense here, too.
The book, meanwhile, has yet to find who really is at the heart of the story.
In some ways, Dohrn seems to want it to be Burns’ Emma, an unlikely revolutionary who went to Swarthmore College, wanted to teach and change the world and somehow found herself with a gun pointed in the direction of a cop. But she’s underwritten at present and comes off mostly as sexually intrigued by her partner, Leon; we never really see her crucial ideological awakening and we should. Otherwise, Dohrn cross-cuts between the two disparate brothers, Hampton and Ernie, as if they were the two sides of their parents’ complex legacy, one running into one barrier after another as he rages against the machine at huge personal cost, the other trying to keep his brother safe and find a different path for himself. One that can be taken without feeling like he let down his familial legacy. Or abandoned rage.
Many children of 1960s radicals will relate to that, of course, and that is the great strength of “Revolution(s),” a show that deserves a future beyond this production and will, I think, get one. Dohrn has written what he knows and he’s mostly found the right soundtrack. What Dohrn has to do now is remove the thematic whiplash from all the cross-cutting, make it clear that every choice comes with a price and find the true center of his show. He needs his characters to actually confront each other. He has to take on the sacred cows.
What did rage achieve? What does it mean now? This is a show mostly set in 2014 but it could be the Chicago present. The machine, an all-American survivor, is right there on our streets.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
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Review: “Revolution(s)” (3 stars)
When: Through Nov. 16
Where: The Goodman’s Owen Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes
Tickets: $34-$104 at 312-443-3800 and goodmantheatre.org