Musical artists help uplift, connect school in Hawaii
Stephen King thriller ‘Mr. Mercedes’ was hiding in plain sight
HONOLULU — Some of Hawaii’s most popular musical artists have appeared before an unlikely audience — an elementary school on Oahu’s coast.
These are gigs with a purpose: The principal dreamed up the virtual concerts, presenting headliners like internationally renowned ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro, as a way of bringing together a community struggling with the pandemic.
“We have probably the best ukulele player — one of the best ukulele musicians in the entire world — that’s gonna come and play for you guys tonight,” said Aikahi Elementary Principal Keoki Fraser as children and parents tuned in from home computers. “And, he’s from Hawaii.”
Fraser is trying to organize concerts every several weeks as his school continues to educate its students remotely.
The first five concerts featured well-known artists like singer Kimie Miner and reggae artist Kolohe Kai.
Tabitha Persaud, mom of three Aikahi students, remembers Fraser coming to the parent-teacher association with the idea of approaching big names. “Can we do that?” she wondered. “Will they do that for us?”
She was surprised by the caliber of the acts, but “they’re in the same situation as we are. So, I mean, they’re not having to go anywhere and leave their home or anything. So it’s really simple for them.”
“We just hit them up,” said Fraser.
“We love to get people that are influential that the kids look up to.”
During a recent concert, Fraser invited former student Dylan Kunz, now a seventh grader, to play ukulele as one of the student performers to open for Shimabukuro.
Kunz, who idolizes Shimabukuro, was stoked. “He’s the reason I started playing,” he said. “It keeps me motivated to keep playing.”
Shimabukuro himself attended Hawaii public schools. Before performing, he explained that he started playing when he was 4 years old; his mother was his first teacher.
As he played an upbeat flamenco piece, followed by the Beatles tune “In My Life,” the online conferencing platform’s participant boxes showed children swaying to the music. A mom twirled her daughter around.
The chat panel lit up with messages like “mind blown,” and “that was amazing.”
“Even though we’re not on campus and even though things are different, we want to do things to make sure you guys have fun and want to make sure you knew we care about you guys,” Fraser told the concertgoers.
The concerts are open to all. For one performance, about 1,200 viewers tuned in, Fraser said.
“I think it’s so much fun to see the smiling, happy faces of all the kids, and COVID has taken so much away from the kids,” said Amy Kunz, Dylan’s mom. “I think principal Fraser, in doing this, is really hitting home on that social-emotional aspect, that even though we’re not in school, we can still make these connections and have fun.”
ne of Stephen King’s most creepy and tense stories was hiding in plain sight.
“Mr. Mercedes” started life in 2017 as a broadcast offering on the AT&T-owned, DirecTV-exclusive Audience Network, only to be left marooned with an uncertain future after the obscure channel was shut down. The crime series gets another life this month after NBC’s Peacock streaming service acquired it.
“Nobody could find it. And that was enormously frustrating,” says director Jack Bender. “Hopefully it’s going to get the audience it’s always deserved.”
The pitch-dark series — adapted by David E. Kelley and starring Brendan Gleeson — is based on Stephen King’s bestselling Bill Hodges trilogy and follows a retired, ornery detective tormented by a seriously troubled serial killer who announces himself by mowing down dozens of people in line for a job fair in a stolen Mercedes.
“My intention was always to do a character-driven, scary show about the monster inside these people instead of the monster outside the people,” says Bender. “Even though they’re monstrous people doing monstrous things, they are not, quoteunquote, boogeyman monsters.”
The first two seasons of “Mr. Mercedes” are bingeable on Peacock. The show’s most recent outing, 2019’s Season 3, will arrive on a date to be announced.
In addition to Gleeson, the cast includes Harry Treadaway, Kelly Lynch, Jharrel Jerome, Mary-Louise Parker, Holland Taylor, Breeda Wool and Nancy Travis. The series was filmed in Charleston, South Carolina, which stood in for Ohio.
English actor Treadway, who has played a genius psychopath in “Penny Dreadful,” takes on the serial killer in “Mr. Mercedes” and calls him “a unique, brilliantly drawn, complicated character.” He calls the story “electric.”
Treadway says one of his most powerful memories is watching King’s “The Shining” with Jack Nicholson and called King’s trilogy “such a page-turner. I just binged it and, in a dark way, just fell in love with the character and the world.”
His serial killer is tightly wound, vindictive, awkward, clever, a victim of abuse, a loner and filled with rage. “As an actor, my part of the process was definitely not to judge him. It was to understand him and get into the skin of him.”
Even years after filming, Treadway seems rattled: “That as a process was fascinating, disturbing at times, lingered afterward — I won’t forget.”
While faithful to the books, Kelley and Bender inserted their own ideas to the adaptation. Kelley added a next-door neighbor to the detective (played by Taylor), and Bender gave him an extensive vinyl record collection and a tortoise to look after.
The pet was inspired by a tortoise that Bender’s own daughter — Hannah Bender, the show’s costume designer — got when she was a child and the records give the series a quirky soundscape, from Donovan, Reagan Youth, Leonard Cohen and Radiohead to the Drifters, T Bone Burnett and Juice Newton.
“I wanted the music to come from the characters in ‘Mr. Mercedes’ because I really don’t love just putting the record on and letting it be emotional or cool over a montage,” says Bender.
Bender was executive producer and lead director on the ABC series “Lost,” but don’t expect many Easter eggs like that show in “Mr. Merecedes,” although there’s a nod to King with the inclusion of the Ramones’ song “Pet Sematary” — also the title of a novel by King — and the writer himself makes a cameo.
Bender says that’s only fitting: “All of his books, even if they are advertised and known to have a supernatural flair, have very rich characters. They all do.”