I will be interested in seeing if they release this as a set before decisions are made as to where the show may go next.Originally Posted by pablo
I would like to see it too as I believe it stands on it's own as a fabuluos creative performance.
I will be interested in seeing if they release this as a set before decisions are made as to where the show may go next.
I would like to see it too as I believe it stands on it's own as a fabuluos creative performance.
http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/05/0...-brothers.html
At the bloody heart of “Ghost Brothers of Darkland County,” the Southern gothic musical by Stephen King and John Mellencamp, is a tense sibling rivalry between a novelist with a dark streak and a blue-jeans-wearing crooner. Frank (Lucas Kavner) and Drake McCandless (Justin Guarini) are surely meant to evoke younger versions of the famous team that created them.
The brothers are at odds over, among other things, the attention of their parents and the affections of a woman, but creating a musical can inspire just as much tension. Just ask Bono, another pop star moonlighting as a theater composer.
While nowhere near as messy, “Ghost Brothers” has an ungainliness that brings to mind the original “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” Also developed over many years by famous musical-theater novices, this sprawling show, running at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, stitches together dynamic elements that never satisfyingly cohere. It has the feel of something devised over Skype.
Fans of Mr. King and Mr. Mellencamp will, however, find much of interest, since you can hear their unmistakable voices, particularly the witty, literate cackle of Mr. King, one of popular culture’s greatest storytellers. His melodramatic yarn opens with a creepy, tattooed singer named the Shape (which, incidentally, is what Michael Myers is called in the credits of “Halloween”) ascending out of a trap door.
A redneck version of the M.C. from “Cabaret,” played with oily glee by Jake La Botz, he presents himself as our conscience’s evil alter ego. About church he says:
“I get bad reviews there. Always have. True artists usually do.”
The musical comes alive in Mr. La Botz’s every bravura entrance. But his stage time is too brief. The plot instead hangs on a perpetually postponed story told by the brothers’ anguished father, Joe (Tony winner Shuler Hensley), who keeps getting sidetracked by a flashback or a visit from a ghost.
Joe’s older brothers died mysteriously in their family cabin, and the similarities between Frank and Drake and that generation don’t bode well for them. Dead ancestors wander in and out of Todd Rosenthal’s shadowy, nicely dilapidated set.
One benefit of this fleet of apparitions is that they provide an impressive chorus of voices to support Mr. Mellencamp’s score of blues, gospel and roots. The music director, T Bone Burnett, the Grammy-winning producer of the “O Brother, Where Art thou” soundtrack, handles a diverse range of styles without ever sounding a slick note.
Hard-driving songs like “Brotherly Love,” sung between punches by Drake and Frank, and the Shape’s impish numbers are catchy, backed by gravelly voices and modest choreography. The ensemble number “Tear This Cabin Down” closes the first act with a lift, but its warning of terrible things from the past returning has already been established, so there’s no satisfying twist to create buzz during intermission.
The songs don’t move the story along so much as illuminate character. Too often they slow down Mr. King’s tale, when not actively distracting you from it with lyrics that tell more than show.
Why would the sexpot Anna (Kylie Brown), the girl the living brothers are fighting over, tell Frank she’s a liar who is “one thousand percent illusion”? And in an overcrowded show, does their mother (Emily Skinner) really need her own song?
It’s not just the tension-killing tangents that prevent one from getting lost in this story. The director Susan V. Booth’s often-fussy staging mixes in a variety of video images and elaborate lighting sequences, not to mention words projected on the set that comment knowingly on the action. The production is as rambling as the script.
An anything-goes strategy could work for a looser, comic entertainment, but not a ghost story that aims to spook. Or, with its parade of Southern gothic references (Faulkner Williams, O’Connor) and melodramatic metaphors, is the show supposed to be a winking, mischievous musical? It’s not clear.
Gothic fiction is often overstuffed, but as Mr. King pointed out in his book “Dance Macabre,” what the genre still requires are convincing characters and an evocative mood.
The intricate story of “Ghost Brothers” might work wonderfully on the page, and the show does resist cliché. Far from cheaply horrifying ghouls, Mr. King’s ghosts appear as haunted by the living as the reverse.
But the mood too often wavers. The ghosts fade into the background, sometimes on purpose, other times not.
One can understand the temptation to let Mr. King’s imagination roam, but for a delicate, collaborative form like the musical, a simpler, streamlined narrative might have made more sense. “Ghost Brothers” brings to mind a suitably violent writer’s truism: Sometimes you have to kill your babies.
Ghost Brothers of Darkland County
Book by Stephen King; music and lyrics by John Mellencamp; musical direction by T Bone Burnett; directed by Susan V. Booth; choreography by Daniel Pelzig; sets by Todd Rosenthal; costumes by Susan E. Mickey; lighting by Robert Wierzel; sound by Clay Benning; projections by Adam Larsen; music supervision and arrangements by Andy York; fight choreography by Scot Mann and Kelly Martin; dramaturgy by Celise Kalke; production stage manager, Pat A. Flora. Presented by the Alliance Theater at the Woodruff, Ms. Booth, artistic director. At the Alliance Theater at the Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree Street, Atlanta; (404) 733-5000; alliancetheatre.org. Through May 13. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
WITH: Peter Albrink (Jack McCandless), Kylie Brown (Anna Wicklow), Kate Ferber (Jenna), Justin Guarini (Drake McCandless), Shuler Hensley (Joe McCandless), Joe Jung (Newt), Lucas Kavner (Frank McCandless), Jake La Botz (the Shape), Royce Mann (Young Joe), Christopher L. Morgan (Dan Coker), Emily Skinner (Monique McCandless) and Travis Smith (Andy McCandless).
Sounds like the story is very interesting. Wonder if the book, when and if published with the CD, will be more like a novel and less like a script. I never read a theater book. Is it like a play? Maybe King will novelize it...
I'm sure it's like reading a screenplay, with descriptions and dialogue and the like. King is good with that, I always enjoy reading his scripts as much as his ordinary prose fiction.
There is a new mention of the musical with a possible New York City run in September.
http://www.playbill.com/news/article...C-Presentation
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/ne...etion-20121114
No King text?It's taken 13 years, thousands of hours and countless rewrites, but Stephen King and John Mellencamp's musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County is beginning to take its final shape. A version of the show ran in Atlanta earlier this year, and a CD/DVD deluxe edition, featuring the soundtrack, handwritten lyrics and a mini-documentary about the making of the musical, is hitting shelves on March 19th. The soundtrack features guest singers Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow, Taj Mahal, Kris Kristofferson and Mellencamp himself.
Mellencamp got the initial idea for the musical in the late 1990s from his own cabin in Bloomington, which he claims is haunted. In the 1930s two brothers got into a fight over a woman at the cabin, and one of them wound up dead. The surviving brother and the woman sped away in a car, but crashed into a lake and drowned. "I called up Stephen King and told him I wanted to make a musical out of the thing," says Mellencamp. "It's outside both of our wheelhouses."
Stephen King only vaguely knew Mellencamp when he got the call. "He came to my place in Florida and it was the first time we ever met in person," says King. "He tuned my guitar and told me about this ghost story about a cabin he owned. I loved the idea they were brothers, and then years later history repeats itself. Something in that resonated with me deeply."
King agreed to write a treatment of the story – which seesaws between the two sets of brothers going through a similar struggle 30 year apart at the same cabin – and Mellecanmp began writing songs. They agreed early on that the songs wouldn't move the story forward. "It was Steve's job to tell the story," says Mellencamp. "It was my job to develop the characters through songs. That's different than most musicals. The best example of that is My Fair Lady. They had a story with Pygmalion, so they just stuck songs in there."
The process was extremely slow since both men were busy with their day jobs. They slowly picked away at it during their downtime, often e-mailing each other to compare notes. "On a creative level we were always in harmony," says King. "We have the same kinds of interests, same background, small town, regular people kind of thing. Also, the more I worked with him the more amazed I was by his level of talent."
Neither man is used to collaboration, let alone working on a single project for more than a decade. "It's very hard for us to work with so many people," says Mellencamp. "We're not really collaborators. I make my records, and he writes his books." Ultimately, they both found it rewarding to stretch their boundaries. "You can just keep doing the same shit and you'll make a living at it," says King. "But the question is, do you want to dig a rut and furnish it? Or do you want to try something new, particularly when you know if you screw it up, you're gonna fall on your face?"
As the musical got closer to completion they brought in producer T Bone Burnett to help flesh out the music. "The idea was for me to come in and create the vibe," Burnett says. "We took the songs and cast them with different singers and musicians , and began creating what I hoped would be a foggy, ghost sound – something that grew up out of the Mississippi."
There was a recent table reading in New York for possible investors, but as of now there's no definitive plan for it to come to Broadway. "There's business people that want it to be on Broadway," says Mellencamp. "I can't speak for Stephen, but for me it doesn't matter. It's the process I enjoy, not the outcome."
King has a different take on the matter. "We were talking about Broadway right away," he says. "John believes in reaching for the stars in everything he does. . . . But a lot of Broadway these days is fucking Disneyland. It's blue-haired ladies from Westchester County. They come in buses and they want to see Aida or the Lion King. It's almost like an amusement park."
They also think it might work as a movie at some point in the future. "I'd love to see that," says King. "One of the other reasons that I did that is that I'm a total whore for musicals. I love Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge, Bugsy Malone. You name it and I just love it! It appeals to a sentimental side of me."
Whatever happens, King and Mellencamp are confident they're nearly done fiddling with it. "At this point I don't know what else we could so," says King. "Unless we set it in fucking outer space. Hey, that's not a bad idea! It could work!"
Here is the track listing for the Ghost Brothers of Darkland Couny soundtrack, coming to stores on March 19th, 2013:
"That's Me," Elvis Costello
"That's Who I Am," Neko Case
"So Goddamn Smart," Dave Alvin, Phil Alvin, Sheryl Crow
"Wrong, Wrong, Wrong About Me," Elvis Costello
"Brotherly Love," Ryan Bingham, Will Dailey
"How Many Days," Kris Kristofferson
"You Are Blind," Ryan Bingham
"Home Again," Sheryl Crow, Dave Alvin, Phil Alvin, Taj Mahal
"What's Going On Here," Rosanne Cash
"My Name Is Joe," Clyde Mulroney
"Tear This Cabin Down," Taj Mahal
"And Your Days Are Gone," Sheryl Crow, Dave Alvin, Phil Alvin
"Jukin'," Sheryl Crow
"What Kind of Man Am I," Kris Kristofferson, Phil Alvin, Sheryl Crow Dave Alvin, Taj Mahal
"So Goddamn Good," Phil Alvin, Dave Alvin, Sheryl Crow
"Away From This World," Sheryl Crow
"Truth," John Mellencamp
You can also hear Elvis Costello's rendition of "That's Me" at the Rolling Stone site (bottom of the page)
Ghost Brothers of Darkland County will be available across a variety of formats. The (enhanced CD) Standard Edition features the complete soundtrack, dialog excerpts and digital libretto. The (2CD/1DVD) Deluxe Edition contains the complete soundtrack (with and without dialog), deluxe art work, handwritten lyrics, specially printed libretto and the “Making of Ghost Brothers” mini-documentary DVD featuring in-depth interviews with King, Mellencamp and Burnett along with other bonus material. Ghost Brothers of Darkland County digital editions for tablets, smartphones and e-readers will allow users to interact in unprecedented ways with the complete soundtrack + digital libretto, as well as exclusive video and graphic materials.
Too bad there won't be an edition with the play filmed.
Wanted list:
Ubris
so, i'm guessing King's script will not be included in that deluxe edition?
-justin
The way I read it, the libretto (King's script) will be digital in the enhanced CD edition and printed in the deluxe edition.
Deluxe edition it is! The RS article didn't specify that detail, which is huge, one would think.
ghostbrothersofdarklandcounty.com
actually, it says the deluxe has a printed libretto and the other editions have a digital libretto and then it says libretto by Stephen King, so perhaps we will see a proper release.
-justin
If you mean a separate book, I don't think so.
it says the printed version will appear in the deluxe edition and digitally on the regular release. i'm assuming it will be some sort of bound book.
-justin
The set is still not available for preorder anywhere, looks like.
http://www.concordmusicgroup.com/rel..._all/upcoming/
https://catalog.simonandschuster.com...from=&find=&a=
Is this the deluxe edition with King's printed book? Seems rather long, 110 pages.
Size is 11x11. Perhaps a lot of photos/images?
If it's in script format, a page of script per minute is the average, so the size isn't a surprise. The listed publisher is the same company producing the CD/DVD sets.
Really looking forward to this. The Play was great. Elvis Costello should do a great job with "That's Me"
Not yet up on Amazon though. Or anywhere else.
Ms Mod is looking into it.
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