The New York Times: POWERHOUSE
Right before the lights went down at “Powerhouse,” a portrait of the visionary career and blinkered personal life of musical pioneer Raymond Scott, I leaned forward to the row in front of me to ask the longtime publicist of the Fringe Festival, Ron Lasko, if he had seen anything great that I should know about. “No!” he said in a refreshing break from tradition of the usual press agent puffery (Ron, God bless him, had also warned me to avoid the opening ceremonies at all costs, which is the kind of thing that can give a flack a reputation for honesty).
Eighty minutes later, the situation, I would suspect, had changed. “Powerhouse,” which somehow manages to pack very funny puppetry, exuberant dance numbers, fascinating historical tangents, a mountain of narrative and a vivid sense of period mood into one steam train of a drama, is the rare Fringe show that lives up to its title.
You may not have heard of Scott, a Brooklyn-born musician whose career spans from the thirties to the seventies, but you know his music, which has been hard wired into the public consciousness mostly because Warner Brothers used it to great effect in classic Looney Tunes episodes (“The Simpsons” has, too). When you think of a cartoon chase, his music is playing in your head. But these irresistibly catchy aural quotes are only one of many highlights of a varied career that included a stint at Motown, the 1964 groundbreaking album of ambient sounds “Soothing Sounds for Baby” and trailblazing work with electronic music, including designing some of the world’s earliest synthesizers, drum machines and samplers. R.E.M.’s guitarist Peter Buck once said of his deliriously quirky compositions: “it sounds like nothing so much as the future.”
In the fluid drama, we see the bumbling taskmaster pursue oddball ideas such as musical toothbrushes or a contraption called the Electronium with the determination of a mad scientist to the exclusion of all else, treating a parade of suffering wives with less concern than the machines he endlessly tinkered with. Instead of marveling at the incongruities of his life, “Powerhouse,” whose gleeful style resists the temptations of sentiment until the end, presents his artistic accomplishment and personal failure as inextricably linked.
The bio-play is usually a dreary, earthbound form, especially ones about artists whose triumphs are not easy to dramatize. But director Jon Levin and his Brooklyn-based company Sinking Ship Productions avoid the usual traps of connect-the-dots storytelling with an endless procession of theatrical ideas that creatively link scenes and employ multiple meanings to tell a story with maximum economy. The break down of a machine doubles as Scott’s heart attack. His wives serve as parts of an elaborate musical instrument played by the artist, a wonderful metaphor for his tightly controlled relationships.
As Scott, Erik Lochtefeld (“Metamorphoses”), in a disciplined, charismatic performance that could be a little less endearing, is a flurry of perpetual motion. He’s bumbling, awkward and, most of all, constantly looking for the next new thing.
Of course, so are the audiences at the Fringe, and with this talented young company, we may have found it.
Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company