Picture: Joan Marcus
We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time continues at The Public Theater, New York until 14 July 2019.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
David Cale brings an enthralling intimate dimension to musical theatre with his one-person show We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time.
The British-born monologist both wrote and performs the show, recounting his traumatic growing up in the late 1960s-early 1970s in the industrial town of Luton, where his grandfather owned a hat factory. It’s a big-hearted, passionate confessional that pulls you in, at first with its humour and quirky detail, then holds you with the sheer drama of the family events that surrounded him and finally lifts you with its closing exultation of being alive, despite the blows and the bruises.
It’s further enriched with the plentiful songs and musical under-scorings woven seamlessly into the tapestry of the telling. Cale wrote the lyrics and co-composed the music with Matthew Dean Marsh.
Some of the songs are brief, some are extended. Several have a semi-classic aura. There are no pauses for applause, and Cale sings them with a compelling sincerity, sometimes simply, sometimes intensely, but without the embellishment of needless vocal fireworks.
Six musicians, including Marsh who conducts from the piano, are situated upstage, unseen during the non-musical sections, but viewed in silhouette during the musical portions. It makes for an elegant staging by director Robert Falls on Kevin Depinet’s handsomely spare set design, fitted out primarily with just a stool and standing mic, and sensitively lit in shifting patterns by Jennifer Tipton.
Cale begins with a sweet ode to the Canadian geese flying over Luton, and we learn how as a young boy he set up a “Bird and Animal Hospital”, first off by simply painting those words on a shed near his house. With the addition of an aviary, it ignited Cale’s passion for birds especially tropical birds, a frequent theme in his work, with their flight and colour symbols of joy and freedom.
Things, however, are not joyous at home, with tensions always boiling between Cale’s alcoholic, frequently absent father Ron and his artistically inclined mother Barbara, the marriage lorded over by Ron’s gruff and unfeeling father.
In telling their story, Cale by dint of unadorned acting artistry transforms himself in long sections to become both Ron and Barbara. We get to know them deeply, and it heightens the shock when the narrative reveals the central event in Cale’s teenage years: the murder of his mother by his father, bashing her head in with a hammer. It leaves Cale in charge of his younger brother Simon and for a time his father as well, when Ron is released from prison after serving a reduced time on the basis of temporary insanity.
And in trying to deal with his mother’s death, Cale sings perhaps the show’s loveliest song, ‘I Love You More Than You Know’. He does find some relief when he becomes friends with a group of vivacious girls at school, described in the pop-like upbeat number, ‘All the Smart Girls (Listened to Joni Mitchell)’.
The narrative also touches on Cale’s homosexuality. In one instance, he sings of going to prison to visit his father and fearful that he’ll be beaten up because he looks gay, “dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy”. “Stay hidden./Don’t come out./There’s danger/To be yourself/Here,” he sings in the song ‘Poufter’.
How Cale eventually works his way through the tragedy, finds his way to New York and becomes a performer, spins by rather quickly, but then there’s the triumphant finish.
In Cale’s enactment of his mother, she tells us of the “loveliest moment” she ever had with him: going to see the movie Cabaret and then enjoying lemon meringue pie at a Hamburger Bar. She had to lie about the 13-year-old’s age to get him into the theatre, which required a 15-year-old minimum. And with that, Liza Minnelli becomes a sort of totem in Cale’s psyche, even though, as his mom tells us, the 13-year-old frets after seeing the film that Minnelli “may have possibly been overacting in her first scene”.
Years later when he comes eye to eye with Minnelli sitting in the audience while he’s performing in a Broadway revival of The Threepenny Opera, it opens his soul and he sees flying out gorgeously into the Broadway theatre flocks of birds who then return to harbour within him.
The rejuvenation is further aided by a return visit to Luton, where Cale discovers that the building that housed his grandfather’s hat factory has been turned into an arts centre.
It all makes for a grand apotheosis leading to Cale’s final celebratory song ‘The Feral Child’. It’s a child he hears shouting repeatedly: “No one can tame me… Cause I’m alive.” And you may want to shout along.
Ron Cohen
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