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HYDROGEN JUKEBOX Audience Guide Layout 1 See the guide in color online at www.skylightmusictheatre.org Audience Guide music theatre 2013-2014 HYDROGEN JUKEBOX is the fascinat- Part one Our 55th Season ing result of the collaboration between •Song #1: Iron Horse Issue 4, March 2014 avant-garde composer Philip Glass “Lightning’s blue glare fills the Oklahoma plains” IN THIS ISSUE and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Glass •Song #2: Iron Horse and Ginsberg met by chance at St. “Who’s the enemy, year after year?” Mark's bookshop in New York in 1988. •Song #3: Jahweh and Allah Battle Glass had just been asked to perform “Jahweh with Atom Bomb” at a benefit for the Vietnam Veteran •Song #4: Consulting I Ching smoking pot Theater, and asked Ginsberg to join listening to the Fugs sing Blake him. At the performance, Ginsberg “That which pushes upward” read his poem WICHITA VORTEX •Song #5: Marijuana Notation SUTRA to music composed by Glass. “How sick I am!” Enthusiastic about the prospect of •Song #6: Patna-Benares Express further collaboration, Glass and “Whatever it may be whoever it may be” Ginsberg embarked on the project Last night in Calcutta which became HYDROGEN JUKEBOX. “Still night the old clock ticks” •Song #7: To P.O. The duo envisioned a theatrical por- “The whitewashed room,” trait of America from the '50s to the •Song #8: Last Night in Calcutta '80s. The libretto is a selection of Gins- “...And the vast starry space-” berg poems that range in content from •Song #9: Crossing Nation highly personal poems to his reflection “Under silver wing” on social issues: the anti-war move- Over Denver Again ment, the sexual revolution, drugs, “Grey clouds blot sunglare, mountains float Eastern philosophy and environmental west, plane” awareness; all issues that seemed Going to Chicago "counter-cultural" in their day. “22,000 feet over hazed square vegetable plant” •Song #10: Wichita Vortex Sutra: Pt II “I’m an old man now, and a lonesome man in In an interview, Ginsberg said this of Kansas but not afraid” Poetry of the title: “[It] comes from a verse in Allen Ginsberg the poem HOWL: ‘...listening to the Part two crack of doom on the hydrogen juke- •Song #11: Howl: Moloch (Section II) Music by box...’ It signifies a state of hyper- “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed trophic high-tech, a psychological open their skulls and ate up their brains and Philip Glass state in which people are at the limit of imagination?” their sensory input with civilization's •Song #12: Manhattan Thirties Flash This production is generously military jukebox, a loud industrial roar, “Long stone streets inanimate...” sponsored by or a music that begins to shake the •Song #13: Cabin in the Rockies bones and penetrate the nervous sys- “Sitting on a tree stump with half cup of tea” tem as a hydrogen bomb may do •Song #14: Nagasaki Days VI: Numbers in someday, reminder of apocalypse.” Red Notebook “2,000,000 killed in Vietnam” •Song #15: To Aunt Rose In partnership with the The work was originally staged using six vocal parts to represent six arche- “Aunt Rose-now-might I see you” typal American characters- a waitress, •Song #16: The Green Automobile a policewoman, a businessman, a “If I had a green Automobile” priest, a mechanic and a cheerleader. •Song #17: Violence A version of the piece first appeared at “Mexicity drugstore table, giant,” AUDIENCE GUIDE the 1990 American Music Theater CIA Dope Calypso “Richard Secord and Oliver North” Research/Writing by Festival in Philadelphia; the premiere Justine Leonard and Deanie Vallone of the finished work was given at the •Song #18: Nagasaki Days IV for ENLIGHTEN, Spoleto Festival in South Carolina “I walked outside and the bomb’d” Skylight Music Theatre’s later that same year. A Washington •Song #19: Ayers Rock/Uluru Song Education Program Post reviewer praised the work for its “When the red pond fills fish appear” "fully focused, deeply communicative •Song #20: Throw out the Yellow Edited by Ray Jivoff and artistically integrated concept." Journalists of Bad Grammar 414-299-4965 “Out! Out! into the Buddhafields” [email protected] The Washington Times called HYDRO- GEN JUKEBOX "a meeting of two Song #21: Father Death Blues “Hey, Father Death, I’m flying home” www.skylightmusictheatre.org unmistakably American sensibilities." HYDROGEN JUKEBOX The Beat Generation The Beat Generation was a group of At the same time, the American Tran- American post-World War II writers scendental Movement of the nine- who came to prominence in the 1950s, teenth century was an inspiration for as well as the cultural phenomena that the politics of the Beats. Henry David they both documented and inspired. Thoreau was revered as a symbol of Central elements of "Beat" culture protest. It was the Beats, in fact, who included rejection of established stan- played a large role in rehabilitating dards, innovations in style, experimen- Thoreau’s reputation and elevating his tation with drugs, alternative book WALDEN to the status that it sexualities, an interest in Eastern reli- holds today. gion and a rejection of materialism. The original members of the Beat After World War II (1939-1945), Ameri- Generation used a number of different can lifestyles and attitudes changed. drugs, including alcohol, marijuana, The world was forever changed after benzedrine, morphine and later witnessing the Holocaust and the nu- psychedelic drugs including peyote clear bombing of Hiroshima. The and LSD. Much of this usage was Servicemen's Readjustment Act of "experimental," in that they were 1944, known as the GI Bill of Rights, initially unfamiliar with the effects of gave veterans one year of unemploy- these drugs. They were inspired by ment compensation, financial assis- almost antiseptic formalism of the intellectual interest, as well as simple tance for job training and education early twentieth century Modernists. hedonism. Claims that some of these and low-interest loans to buy homes They fashioned a literature that was drugs could enhance creativity, insight and businesses. This aid helped more straightforward and expressive or productivity were quite common. nearly one-quarter of the population than anything that had come before. and stimulated the economy. The publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Allen Ginsberg's HOWL (1956), William HOWL in 1956 marks a turning point in After 1945, marriage rates soared, and S. Burroughs's NAKED LUNCH (1959) both Beat literature and American liter- there was a sharp rise in the birthrate, and Jack Kerouac's ON THE ROAD ature in general. The long-form poem known as the Baby Boom, which (1957) are among the best known is intended to be read aloud, almost created a generation that reshaped examples of Beat literature. Both chanted, a sort of return to an oral tra- the American family and culture for HOWL and NAKED LUNCH were the dition that had been neglected in liter- decades to come. The average family focus of obscenity trials that helped to ature for a long time. The content of had a ranch or split-level house, a car, liberalize publishing in the United the poem raised eyebrows, and and 2.5 children. States. sparked an obscenity trial which chal- lenged the definition of pornography in These years also saw a reappraisal of The “founders” of the Beat Generation America. Ginsberg won, and the judg- conventional society. Just as the post- met at Columbia University in the early ment more or less ensured that poetry war economic boom was taking hold, 1940s. Writers Jack Kerouac and Allen and fiction would from then on be im- students in universities were beginning Ginsberg formed the core of this initial mune to the kind of censorship that to question the rampant materialism of group. It was Kerouac who coined the still plagued other genres of art. their society. The Beat Generation was term “Beat Generation”. The adjective a product of this questioning. They "beat" could mean "tired" or "beaten With HOWL, Ginsberg takes the saw runaway capitalism as destructive down," but Kerouac appropriated the reader/listener on a tour of the under- to the human spirit and antithetical to image and altered the meaning to side of America. There are drug- social equality. In addition to their dis- include the connotations "upbeat," addicts, drifters, prostitutes and satisfaction with consumer culture, the "beatific," and the musical association swindlers. There is a visceral rage Beats saw the stifling prudery of their of being "on the beat." against the system that requires con- parents’ generation and the taboos formity. Foul language, slang, drug against frank discussions of sexuality The Beat Generation pulled from a use and criminality are common as unhealthy and possibly damaging variety of source materials to construct throughout the work . All of these to the psyche. their particular vision of literature and things were shocking in the 1950s. culture. Several of the originators cite The Beat Generation developed a Romantic poets such as Percy Bysshe The Beat Generation was never a reputation as new bohemian hedo- Shelley and William Blake as major in- large movement in terms of numbers, nists, who celebrated non-conformity fluences on their work. Interspersed but in influence and cultural status and spontaneous creativity. In the with their Romantic influences were they were more visible than any other world of literature and art, the Beats surrealist and absurdist tendencies. artistic movement of the time. stood in opposition to the clean, HYDROGEN JUKEBOX Among the leading voices of the Beat both lesser known and established Generation was William Burroughs poets to the mainstream. (1914-1997). His novel, NAKED LUNCH is a difficult and even terrifying novel, An important influence on the Beat and readers continue to be drawn to it Generation was William Carlos for its innovative style and use of lan- Williams (1883-1963), an American poet guage.
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