
In a Pig's Valise
Eric Overmyer (Book and Lyrics) & August Darnell (Music)
June 1989, Broadway Play Publishing ISBN 088145074X
(A musical play, Produced by Center Stage in Baltimore and Second Stage Theater in New York in February, 1989. Directed and choreographed by Graciela Daniele. Nathan Lane played the role of detective James Taxi in this musical. Musical direction was by Kid Creole keyboardist Peter Schott and Charlie Lagond played the role of Blind Sax. Also available in Eric Overmyer's Collected Plays (Plays for Actors) October, 1993 Smith and Kraus ISBN 1880399407)
STEPHEN HOLDEN THEATER: At Heartbreak Hotel, Saxophones and Stolen Dreams The New York Times Sunday, February 12, 1989
In the swirling fog at the corner of Neon and Lonely Streets, by the bar of the Heartbreak Hotel, a ghostly figure in a trenchcoat and slouch hat steps out under a blue streetlight. Launching into a smoky jazz-flavored ballad, James Taxi, a pint-size private eye, huskily drawls out an ode to rain-soaked streets at 2 in the morning, whisky and shining saxophones. So begins ''In a Pig's Valise,'' the new musical theater fantasy, with a book and lyrics by Eric Overmyer, music by August Darnell, and direction and choreography by Graciela Daniele, that opens tonight at the Second Stage. What the 37-year-old playwright (''On the Verge or the Geography of Learning'') and the 38-year-old founder and leader of the pop band Kid Creole and the Coconuts have created is a show that is so unconventional they have dubbed it ''a hard-boiled yarn with music'' rather than a musical comedy. ''In a Pig's Valise'' takes its title from a scene in Raymond Chandler's novel ''The Little Sister'' in which the enigmatic phrase is flung as an insulting retort meaning ''not on your life.'' Among the characters who stalk the netherworld of the Heartbreak Hotel are Dolores Con Leche, a Hispanic temptress who hires the detective to investigate the disappearance of her kid sister, assorted hotel denizens with such names as Zoot Alors, Root Choyce, the Bop Op and Shrimp Bucket, as well as two pouty singer-dancers, Mustang Sally and Dizzy Miss Lizzy. As the plot deepens, the detective and his slinky client discover an outlandish scheme to drug people and steal their dreams while they're unconscious, then merchandise them as software for holographic dream machines. The conspirators' prize possession is the cryogenically frozen body of Walt Disney. The story swirls together American legends ranging all the way from Disney to John Dillinger, from Philip Marlowe to Huey Newton, with a giddy, insouciant playfulness and in a mix of musical genres that include calypso, funk, pop, cool jazz, country, reggae, hard rock and rap. The persona of Kid Creole, the sharp-dressing, smooth-talking alter ego that Mr. Darnell used to impersonate 24 hours a day, fits so easily into the mythical world of Mr. Overmyer's play that initially there was talk of his appearing in the show as well as writing the music. Mr. Darnell resisted. Like Mr. Overmyer's two other full-length plays - ''On the Verge'' and ''In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe'' - ,''In a Pig's Valise'' is a bold experiment in language, in this case the hard-boiled American detective novel. ''Working with actors, I often have to explain that it's not the same if they paraphrase or invert a word since that changes the rhythm,'' Mr. Overmyer said. ''It's the same thing as playing a different note than what's written in a musical score - it would be wrong. I consciously think of my pieces as scores without music, except of course that this one has music.'' Mr. Overmyer's obsession with language is matched by his interest in genre. ''To me the detective story is one aspect of American mythology,'' he said. ''It's our version of Greek legends. We live with a gold mine of American mythology that's all stuck together. I was drawn to the detective form because it's so American. The piece is really about American vernacular, both linguistic and musical. The idea for the piece began with Raymond Chandler. I've always liked thrillers but especially Chandler's because of his similes. He was the springboard.'' The play became a musical almost by accident. While Mr. Overmyer was writing ''In a Pig's Valise,'' he found what he called ''places for songs.'' Over the last seven years it has gone through more than 20 drafts, and Mr. Overmyer has worked with six different composers, none of whom gave him the musical tone he had in mind. Mr. Darnell recognized his kinship with Mr. Overmyer immediately on receiving the play. ''I was hooked from the first five pages,'' he said. ''Everyone who has seen it is amazed that someone could have written something so close to what I'm about.'' ''In a Pig's Valise'' is only the second musical to be produced by the Second Stage, the Upper West Side theater company whose recent productions of Tina Howe's ''Coastal Disturbances'' and Michael Weller's ''Spoils of War'' moved to Broadway. ''Because it's our 10th season, we wanted to do something special,'' said Robyn Goodman, who co-founded the Second Stage with the director Carole Rothman. ''After doing William Finn's 'In Trousers' in 1981, we were anxious to do another musical. But because we're known predominantly for plays, we don't get many musicals sent to us. Then Eric's script came in, and it was exactly our sense of humor. Eric still hadn't found the right composer. We asked him, 'If you could have anybody in the world who would you like? And he said August Darnell.' '' Because of unforeseen expenses, the show was almost canceled. The typical Second Stage production costs around $100,000, but ''In a Pig's Valise'' may end up costing twice that. A $75,000 grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund saved the day. The teaming of Mr. Overmyer and Mr. Darnell marked the happy end of Mr. Overmyer's nearly eight-year search for a composer. ''In 1981, while writing the first draft of the play, I was listening to Kid Creole and the Coconuts' music, and was already a big fan,'' Mr. Overmyer recalled recently in a joint interview with Mr. Darnell. ''I think I taught myself how to write lyrics by listening to his records. I remember thinking that the spectrum of genres in his music fit the characters in the play, but I figured there was no way I would be able to get August to write the music.'' Considering the differences in their backgrounds, Mr. Overmyer and Mr. Darnell share an imaginative kinship that is uncannily twinlike. The play's whimsical caricatures of zoot-suited tough guys and their sulky molls would not seem out of place if plunked in the middle of one of Kid Creole and the Coconuts' concert extravaganzas. Blond-haired and soft-spoken, Mr. Overmyer grew up in Seattle, attended Reed College, and in the late 70's worked as the literary manager for Playwrights Horizons in New York. For the last several years he has supported himself by writing for television. Two years ago, ''On the Verge,'' his first full-length play, won favorable notice when it opened at the John Houseman Theater. A fable about time traveling, it followed the journey of three intrepid Victorian women who set out with butterfly nets and pith helmets to explore the unknown and find themselves caught in a time warp that propels them inexorably forward into the 1950's. Last summer, ''In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe,'' his play depicting right-wing conspiracy and paranoia in New York, played briefly at the Hudson Guild. Both plays are obsessed with language, the first with lush linguistic Victoriana, the second with minimalist Orwellian newspeak. Mr. Darnell, whose father was of Haitian descent and whose mother was French Canadian, was born in Montreal and grew up in the South Bronx. He studied drama at Hofstra, intending to be an actor, but changed his major from drama to English and ended up teaching English for three years in Hempstead, Long Island. In the mid-1970's, with his Bronx childhood friend Stony Browder, who shared his deep fascination with 40's pop icons, he helped form Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, a musical coalition that released several albums fusing swing, rhythm and blues, and Latin styles. When the Savannah Band's aspirations proved too grandiose to be realized, Mr. Darnell adopted the alias Kid Creole and formed Kid Creole and the Coconuts, the multi-ethnic Latin pop-funk group that has released six critically praised albums. A seventh is scheduled for release this spring on Columbia Records. Recently, Mr. Darnell composed the score for Francis Ford Coppola's ''Life Without Zoe,'' a segment in the three-part film ''New York Stories,'' which also includes short movies by Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese. ''In a Pig's Valise'' is Mr. Darnell's second venture into the musical theater. In 1982, the Public Theater presented a staged concert version of ''Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places,'' his Caribbean-style version of ''The Odyssey,'' in which Kid Creole journeys from port to port in the tropics searching for a lover who has disappeared. Three years ago, he completed the Latin American-style adaptation of ''The Mikado'' for a Public Theater production that was shelved when Kid Creole and the Coconuts became a European sensation and went abroad on tour. Mr. Darnell's nagging worry is that the audience who would most appreciate ''In a Pig's Valise'' may never discover it. Copyright 1989 The New York Times Company
FRANK RICH Review/Theater; The Gumshoe Stomp, Or, Sleuthing to Music The New York Times Wednesday, February 15, 1989
''In a Pig's Valise,'' the ''hard-boiled yarn with music'' at the Second Stage, is an homage to detective fiction by a playwright whose affection for Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett may be second only to his love for the sound of his own voice. The playwright is Eric Overmyer, the author of the widely produced ''On the Verge,'' a work of such relentless erudition that its icy intricacies of diction linger long after the play's subject and human mouthpieces have evaporated. ''In a Pig's Valise'' offers more of the same showy verbiage, but, as they say, ''with music.'' Nonetheless, one is most likely to leave the theater humming the similes. New musicals are so rarely produced, let alone by companies as ambitious as the Second Stage, that the wastefulness of ''In a Pig's Valise'' is dispiriting. The premise, though not original, promises fun. Mr. Overmyer propels his hero, the trench-coated private eye James Taxi (a rumpled Nathan Lane), through every cliche twist known to his pulp genre. As Taxi stalks the Heartbreak Hotel at the corner of Neon and Lonely in the ''kiss-me-deadly night air,'' he encounters femmes fatales, red herrings and unanswered questions that mount up ''like a stack of unpaid utility bills.'' Mr. Overmyer's compulsive, unedited wordplays mount up more precipitously still. Along with similes, ethnic food references and double-entendres, his favorite tic is to tinker idly with familiar phrases: ''a cut and blow-dried case'' or ''I get the driftwood.'' One must do more to parody a literary style that is already, in the hands of its wittiest practitioners, something of a put-on. Mr. Overmyer is clever to a fault, as if he were trying to imitate Tom Stoppard with the aid of a thesaurus. By Act II, the mere mention of the words neon, noir, genre or gumshoe, however linguistically fractured the usage, makes one squirm. Aside from a funny replay of the slapping scene from ''Chinatown,'' the only amusing riffs are those in which the characters deconstruct their own tale, commenting self-consciously on how vintage detective fiction (and films) rely on the past tense, ''ominous underscoring'' and narrative dissolves. Unfortunately, the plot - something an audience may want even in a mock-detective story - is dismantled by the same academic knowingness. The villains of ''In a Pig's Valise'' are trying to steal American dreams, which leads to an avalanche of secondhand, Leslie Fiedleresque ruminations on the metaphysical, political and erotic implications of national myths perpetrated by the likes of Walt Disney and John Dillinger. As a musical - or a play with music, or whatever - ''In a Pig's Valise'' seems an uneasy compromise among strong personalities who never found the essential common ground for collaboration. The composer, August Darnell of the band Kid Creole and the Coconuts, is the kind of pop recruit the musical theater desperately needs, but his own style meets the material halfway only in some sultry saxophone solos. While the music and the onstage band are agreeable, the score seems irrelevant to the show's milieu. So do Mr. Overmyer's amateurish lyrics, with their dead words and inevitable rhymes (''I'm a talent scout without a doubt/ I'm the one who's got the clout.'') The director and choreographer, Graciela Daniele, goes her own way as well by evoking the smoky atmosphere of her last theater piece, ''Tango Apasionado,'' without the tangos. Without any drama to propel it, ''In a Pig's Valise'' would have benefited from a galvanizing style. But Ms. Daniele fails to impose a theatrical order that might integrate the seemingly arbitrary musical numbers into the script. Two dancing girls often sashay about for little reason other than a temporary cessation of puns. Though Mr. Lane is a fine comic actor, he is, as Mr. Overmyer might say, a stalled Taxi - an uncomfortable and unvaried singing detective. The rest of the cast can charitably be described as campy, with the striking exception of Ada Maris, who plays Delores Con Leche, a comic yet sexy lady in red, with more musical-comedy verve than the rest of the company combined. I also enjoyed the usher who deposited me in my seat with the request that I ''laugh really hard, because the critics are here tonight.'' If the response of most of my neighbors was any indication, everybody these days is a critic. THE MALTESE MAGPIE - IN A PIG'S VALISE, book and lyrics by Eric Overmyer; music by August Darnell; directed and choreographed by Graciela Daniele; set design by Bob Shaw; lighting design by Peggy Eisenhauer; costume design by Jeanne Button; musical direction, Peter Schott; sound design, Gary and Timmy Harris; hair design, Antonio Soddu; production stage manager, Robert Mark Kalfin; stage manager, Paula Gray. Presented by the Second Stage Theater, Robyn Goodman and Carole Rothman, artistic directors. At 2162 Broadway, at 76th Street. James Taxi...Nathan Lane Dolores Con Leche...Ada Maris Zoot Alors and Gut Bucket...Jonathan Freeman Root Choyce...Thom Sesma The Bop Op...Reg E. Cathey Blind Sax...Charlie Lagond Shrimp Bucket...Michael McCormick Mustang Sally...Lauren Tom Dizzy Miss Lizzy...Dian Sorel
Copyright 1989 The New York Times Company
Linda Winer Prisoner of Genre Newsday Wednesday, February 15, 1989
IN A PIG'S VALISE: A Hard-Boiled Yarn with Music.' Musical with book and lyrics by Eric Overmyer, music by August Darnell, directed and choreographed by Graciela Danielle. With Nathan Lane, Ada Maris, Reg E. Cathey, Charlie Lagond, Michael McCormick, Jonathan Freeman, Thom Sesma, Lauren Tom, Dian Sorel. Sets by Bob Shaw, costumes by Jeanne Button, lights by Peggy Eisenhauer, with Kid Creole and the Coconuts. Second Stage, Broadway at 76th Street, Manhattan. "IN A PIG'S Valise" has all the promise of a great piece of junk theater - a goofy, off-beat musical that could scale the tipsy heights of "Little Shop of Horrors" or "The Rocky Horror Show." There is a script by Eric Overmyer, the theater's new master of semantic machinations; music by August Darnell, a.k.a. the Kid in the quasi-Carib-pop band of Kid Creole and the Coconuts; direction by Graciela Daniele, who choreographed sublime silliness in "Pirates of Penzance" and put passion in "Tango Apacionado." Mysteriously, and unfortunately, the private-eye spoof that opened last night at Second Stage is a great little junk musical in search of staging and music. There is much to treasure in Overmyer's glitteringly wise and foolish "lingo noir" script and in Nathan Lane's performance as the simile-crazed low-life gumshoe. How enjoyable one finds the show, however, depends on one's willingness to overlook music that is uninspired by its lyrics; lame production numbers that are more stupid than stylish; more than a few queasy slips in the intentionally tacky tone; and one of the most uneven casts ever put together by this prestigious theater. But, first, the good parts. Lane, who made audiences sit up and say, "Who is that toad?" years ago when he played a toad in the short-lived "Wind in the Willows," has been stealing shows ever since. Here, he is James Taxi, a wheezing, bemused dumpling of a detective in a rumpled Columbo trench, who drinks Kahlua with Maalox and is obsessed with the mechanisms of Chandleresque film-noir. Or, as Overmyer has him confide to us, happily standing aside the plot to "cogitate a capella": "we are all prisoners of genre." He's also prisoner of a story set at the Heartbreak Hotel, corner of Neon and Lonely, where a dish named Dolores Con Leche (Sorrows with Milk) works as an ethnic folk dancer - Norwegian, Slavic, South Philly. Dolores, played with just enough Latin bombshell-ism by Ada Maris, believes someone is stealing her dreams. Taxi, whom she called when intending to call a cab, sympathizes: "Dreams, the underwear of the mind . . . too personal to steal." So far, so much fun. Taxi explains to Dolores the superiority of similes over metaphors and why his voiceovers - his VO, not his MO - are necessary to pass on exposition. Meanwhile, a heady saxophone (played by Charlie Lagond, the only member of the Creole band who comes down from its perch to appear onstage) is laying on the atmosphere: "Hard-boiled tip number one," says Taxi, "Trust your underscoring." Too soon, however, we learn we cannot trust the scoring enough. Darnell, an extraordinarly talented composer who favors '40s mysterioso in his own style, would seem to have been the perfect match here. But except for "If I Was a Fool to Dream," the only song not serving as parody, the numbers are shapeless and repetitive. Whether salsa, funk or jazz, they never develop or keep up with Overmyer's elevated sense of fun. The titles are terrific - "Kiss Me Deadly" and, especially the summary, "Doin' the Denouement," but Darnell does not seem to have hooked into them. Also, given the innocence of the show, the raunchy "Put Your Legs on My Shoulders" is a jarring mistake. Faults are also on the shoulders of director-choreographer Daniele. Except for the pithy menace of Bop Op (Reg E. Cathey), the denizens of the Heartbreak are of fatally variable inspiration. Lauren Tom has spunk and talent as one of the back-up Balkans; others can sing but not dance, dance but not sing. This is a problem in a musical. But, always, there is Taxi, getting narrative motion sickness from the attempts to connect to the greater American myth machine. And Overmyer, who makes us fascinated with his fascination with language, making a silk purse out of a pig's valise. One can only wish that Second Stage, known for giving failed plays a second chance, could take a second stab at his.
Copyright 1989 Newsday, Inc.
Don Shewey 7 Days
"Language-besotted as any die-hard cruciverbalist and hip to the self-referential existentialism of postmodern performance, he keeps his intellect in balance with a deep need to entertain; he's a clown with a thesaurus, an incorrigible punster, and a `prisoner of genre, a captive of kitsch,' like the all-singing, all-dancing, trench-coated gumshoe narrator of IN A PIG'S VALISE...off-Broadway hasn't had such a dazzling little musical since LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. And composer August Darnell (of Kid Creole and the Coconuts fame) is a perfect match for Overmyer's pulpy genre-mashing.... underneath the puns and wordplay, it is a metaphysical detective story about the origin of pop-kitsch (a theme throughout Overmyer's work) that treads the same territory as sci-fi renegades William Gibson and Philip K Dick...."-