Review: 69 Love Songs by Gnap! Theatre Projects
by Brian Paul Scipione
If you scour the liner notes of 69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields you will find this admission by writer Stephen Merritt: “I like over-the-top sentimentality if there’s a justification for it.” While this thought is no way to sum up the majesty of his much-beloved indie/emo/pop/retro/folk rock masterpiece album, it is a good way to introduce it.
The second necessary detail is that Merritt did not write 69 Love Songs as a collection of songs about love, but rather as a collection of songs about love songs: almost but not quite a dubious distinction. Also from the liner notes: “I had been thinking it would be good to get into the world of musicals, and probably easier to get into it through a revue of songs along the lines of An Evening with Tom Leher or Jaques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, two revues that don’t need any narrative to be wildly entertaining. Well, I write pretty good love songs. Nobody else is writing love songs.”
So, 69 Love Songs is one part severely sentimental and one part non-narrative musical revue but what would be the final ingredient in this odd, unique and delightful night of entertainment? From the Gnap Theatre website, “Gnap! Theater Projects presents and produces theatrical events that are both deliberately experimental and unashamedly populist.” That’s right -- an improv-based theater group with a love for all things widely loved. The piece 69 Love Scenes is a play in 69 parts inspired and guided by the themes, titles, characters, and moods of 69 Love Songs.
If that all seems like a bit much, that’s because it is. It’s a sprawling night of “moments.” The moment you see the girl you’re destined to love. The moment you realize he is truly no long listening. The moment you must choose to shed your old self and embrace the you that you are when you are with her. The moment you look at a letter that is no long just a piece of a paper but is tangible evidence of your soul’s longing. During a night of standard drama these types of revelatory moments are usually carefully prepared. In the build up, scene after scene of near-misses lead to the moment when the character and the audience have a startling insight into the play’s meaning.
On the original album, Merritt devotes the song “Meaningless” to his assertion that love and everything involved with it is exactly that. But this performance gives a starkly opposite impression. Sure, love is fun, playful, inciting, enticing, exciting -- but in 69 Loves Songs it’s never presented as inconsequential.
This is exactly the kind of performance one would expect from an improv group. It’s in the very nature of improv for the performers to search feverishly for the emotional click with the audience: most often a laugh but sometimes a revelation, a moment of disgust, or a connection of sympathy. Improv audiences are encouraged to ooh, aah, hoot and holler. While the audience was somewhat shy at the performance of 69 Love Scenes I saw last Friday, that didn’t stop the actors from literally diving down among the spectators and bringing their emotions up front and center.
It is by all means the very talented cast that makes this theatrical experiment a roller-coaster ride of poetic emotion. There are four or five story lines woven together through the play, and after the mid-point it is easier to identify them and then to long for each character’s happy ending. The dozen or so characters are amalgamations of the nearly hundred characters from the album. There’s an a Jewish couple reviewing their lives, a cab driver on a quest for the book of love, a folk singer and her on-again, off-again girlfriend, and a punk rock love story that takes place in between a video store and a rock bar, just to name a few.
There are only two weekends left to catch this show. It’s a must for anyone who’s been in love and an absolute must for any fans of Magnetic Fields. Get tickets now or plan on spending the night with a bottle of gin, a mix tape, and a broken heart.
Review by Georgia Young at Austinist.com, July 14
Review by Michael Graupmann at austin.culturemap.com, July 19
69 Love Scenes runs Thursdays-Saturdays through July 23 at Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Road. Performances are at 8 PM and Tickets are $10.
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69 Love Songs
by based on album by Magnetic Fields
Gnap! Theatre Projects
