Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
A Heroic Pairing
Concert explores classical music, cartoons, comics
“The artist community here is invested in exploration. You learn really quickly that art is best when it’s in movement like that. So I love that it’s a fresh collaboration. Who knows what it could lead to? They might find a market for live comic books. It’s something new; something fresh.”
— BRUCE WARREN
Music lovers, assemble!
The Symphony of Northwest Arkansas joins forces with TheatreSquared on June 3 to present an artistic collaboration the likes of which Fayetteville has never seen.
“There’s so many ways you can bring theater to music and vice versa,” says Bob Ford, one of the founders of TheatreSquared. The performance “does bespeak this continuing evolution of a more and more sophisticated, and hip, cutting-edge life to the performing arts and the arts in general in Northwest Arkansas, and I give Paul a lot of credit for seeing the potential for that.”
Paul is Paul Haas, acclaimed music director of SoNA and the leading force in making “Pops: Music and Animation” — the symphony’s final concert of the season — a reality. After the success Haas saw with his program of popular film music, he considered experimenting with the whole cartoon and comics genre.
“We have a really great audience, and we feed off of their energy,” he says. “So when they know the pieces, there’s clearly a lot more energy forthcoming right from the start — because they just get it.”
Listeners may be surprised at the amount of classical music they recognize from favorite childhood cartoons. Bach’s “Toccata and Fuge in D Minor,” Julius Fucik’s “Entry of the Gladiators,” Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville,” Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” — everyone knows these tunes from their appearances in cartoons like “Fantasia” and Looney Tunes and even at the circus.
“It’s a bunch of music that everybody’s going to know,” Haas assures, “but they don’t necessarily know that they know it, or what the title is or who the composer is. So it’s a fun way to spotlight the music as opposed to the cartoon itself. We’ll have that reminiscing a little bit, but I’m sort of excited because nobody ever gets to hear this stuff live and up close and personal.”
So where does TheatreSquared fit into an evening of cartoon soundtracks? The lighted-hearted performance seemed like the perfect place to present an adaptation of a “campy and awesome” piece Haas was commissioned to create a few years ago in New York. “Green Lama” is a 1940s comic book about a man who, after traveling to Tibet and studying Buddhism, is transformed into a crimefighting superhero. Haas has previously coordinated a program with smaller ensembles for a presentation on “Green Lama,” but the pops concert presented the opportunity to orchestrate (pun intended) something much larger.
“We jumped at the chance to work with the symphony because we serve so many of the same folks, and we have such similar missions,” Ford recalls of Haas’ interest in a collaboration. “There’s extra adrenaline for us because we haven’t done anything like this before.”
“It’s the first time I’ve heard of this type of collaboration on this scale, especially,” adds Bruce Warren. A familiar face around T2, Warren (who is currently in his third production with the company) is directing actors who will be reading parts from the comic over Haas’ curated score for the piece. “It’ll be like an old radio show where the actors will do all the voices, and then you hear the cool score behind it — so trying to marry that world and the symphony world. We didn’t want them in competition with each other, more just working together to tell the story.”
Haas has a few other surprises up his sleeve to keep audiences from knowing what to expect. All you need to know is, “it’ll be a a very immersive, threedimensional envisioning of a comic book, which is pretty fun.”