Kaden Brett Forsberg and Josh Bellan in The Simon & Garfunkel Story, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
What is conjured for us at the (newly renovated) Mayfield showroom, in The Simon & Garfunkel Story, is the signature harmonious blend of the last century’s most celebrated duo. There is something witty about starting a show, and a season, as the lights go down in the theatre, with “hello darkness, my old friend….” But I digress.
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This is a show that taps into memory (“the vision that was planted in our brain still remains”) as two expert singers, Josh Bellan and Kaden Brett Forsberg, take on Paul Simon’s indelible songbook. In the Mayfield production directed by the show creator Dean Elliott (with associate director Kate Ryan), this they do in collaboration with a hot band (led by musical director Lisa MacDougall), and an elaborate projection-scape mashup of black-and-white period footage and abstract interpolations of light and colour. It’s nostalgia, in sight and sound. And there’s even currency: the intrepid Simon has continued to tour this summer.
There they are, onstage in concert: the intense Bellan, guitar in hand as songwriter Simon; the lanky Brett Forsberg with the mop of hair, motionless, hands in his pockets, as Garfunkel. They have the look. And what the pair delivers, in an uncanny way, is a series of hits from a hit-studded archive, arranged in rough chronological order, from their earliest days as high school rock buds Tom and Jerry to their triumphant 1981 reunion concert in Central Park: Hey Schoolgirl to Cecilia, Bridge Over Troubled Water, The Boxer…. On opening night the sound mix, usually impeccable at the Mayfield, was marred by over-amplification in favour of the band, easily adjusted one imagines.
Great songs aplenty from a stellar archive. A “story”? Not so much. Narration exists only in brief, flat annotations by the singers, who step out of the music and their “roles” occasionally to address us about Simon and Garfunkel, in the third person. “Paul had a decision to make.” Or “they were making a real name for themselves in the folk-rock scene all over the world.”
The famous break-up which preceded the famous reunion gets the helpful notation that “at this time Paul and Art’s relationship was at a breaking point.” It was “a rollercoaster relationship,” and “they felt they were moving in different directions.” Did the fact that one guy wrote the songs and lyrics, and the other guy didn’t, have anything to do with the celebrated estrangement? Discuss amongst yourselves. And, hey, think of it as relief for survivors of exhaustive musical revues where a narrator introduces every song, and footnotes every trip to the recording studio, every rehearsal.
Anyhow, instead of “story,” in which the show clearly isn’t much interested (beyond identifying the albums from which songs are culled), there are projections (by Z Frame). They’re a fascinating, ever-changing collage of images that seem to be about cultural context, capturing the moment in America. The news footage sequence at the outset, for example, alights on seminal Civil Rights Movement identifiers. The haunting Scarborough Fair is accompanied by Vietnam protest footage. There are period ads; there’s a collage of images from The Graduate….
And occasionally, there are insertions, projected in type, of titles of films in which Garfunkel appeared in his actor period, or Simon singles. We learn, in one projected sentence, that Garfunkel became a math teacher, and in another that he walked around the world writing poetry (there might be Fringe comedy in that).
The two stars, both excellent, are new to the much-travelled hit homage devised by Elliott, the designated Paul Simon the last time we saw the show at the Mayfield nine years ago. As last time for me, the most striking juxtaposition of visuals and music happens in the great song America. It unrolls in a series of vintage postcards from out-of-the-way places evoked by the song’s quest through the hinterland: “Greetings from Barstow,” or Denver, or Santa Cruz.
What has changed in the last decade is the battering ram the word Freedom has become, and even the word America doesn’t have the same meaning. In so many ways we are all “looking for America,” and it makes that song poignant and nostalgic as never before, a kind of requiem for what has been lost.
So, a season-opening evening in the company of an archive of songs with memorably poetic lyrics, delivered in concert by two harmonizing singers with a first-rate band, projections (and the bonus possibility of a cocktail called Bridge Over Bourbon Waters). This highly enjoyable evening is all in the music. And that’s a lot.
REVIEW
The Simon & Garfunkel Story
Theatre: Mayfield
Created, produced, directed by: Dean Elliott
Starring: Josh Bellan, Kaden Brett Forsberg, Oscar Derkx, Matthew Atkins, Lisa MacDougall, Derek Stremel, Harley Symington
Running: through Nov. 2
Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca
