This is certainly very clever and inventive, and I can see the way it points toward a new kind of theatre, (and I remain very open to the idea that performed, with Crow in his Keith Richards jacket and the Star-Man in his Star-Suit and all, it might be revelatory), but I'm not convinced it ultimately really works. The rock 'n' roll Highlander thing is tops, and the cool nonspecific way Shepard conflates jive talkin and cock (o' the) walkin and fifties-style "chicken" car racing and shivs and guns into an icy cool future nightmare of rock iconology and aggression (though not much sex, which, like, seriously? What's the point of drugs and rock 'n' roll, let alone honour and duels, without sex?). It is tops. But there is a failure of imagination, where it's the Delta blues and the Duane Allman and we don't know how far in the future this is, but this play was written in 1972 and glam was coming on (viz. Galactic Jack) and you'd think it would have been obvious that the trash culture of the past would be suborned and forgotten in favour of the new trash culture of the future. That the musical thugs of 2001, say, if they were indeed going to be musical (and they were in '01, but methinks not much longer) would in no way reach back to any fucking noble hierarchy.


WHY did the sixties think they were so singular?

WHY did they fail to foresee the punks?

WHY did they think Jagger was any different than Bing Crosby?


All Shepard would have had to do to make this A Clockwork Orange instead of, y'know, Little Heroes, is make the slightest gesture. The Heaven 17. Codpieces. Mandibles and ferns and eyedrop drugs and beats like slabs of raw meat. Or, like . . . rap or something. But as is this is inventive but annoying. ( )