Jackie Madejski (as Sara and Doctor) and Rachel Alyson (as Mary). Photo by Jonathan Zuck
By DCist contributor Elena Goukassian
When was the last time you saw (or even heard about) a new rock opera? With the possible exception of the Green Day musical American Idiot, probably not since the ’70s, right?
“People live a sampled life these days,” says Mark Baughman, who recently wrote a rock opera of his own. “It’s rare that people are looking for complete albums like Dark Side of the Moon anymore.”
Playing at the Silver Spring Black Box Theatre for the next two weekends, Baughman’s 99 A Rock Opera was inspired by what many believe to be the greatest in the genre, The Who’s 1969 album Tommy. It’s a touchstone for Baughman. “As much as I try not to copy it, I would go back and look at what Pete Townshend does in certain situations, and it gave me the same structural ideas,” he says. “I realized just what a genius he is. It’s humbling.”
Although Baughman works as an architect as his day job, he used to be a serious musician while attending college in Boston in the ’70s. But when he saw all the talented people around him struggling to make ends meet, he “decided to get a real job.” Fast forward to 2014. “I was with a band and we were tired of playing covers, so I started writing my own songs,” he says. He noticed that his new songs followed a vague story line, and, inspired by his musical hero, Townshend, he decided to turn the songs into a rock opera.
99 A Rock Opera tells the story of Pete, a middle-aged engineer at the Cleveland Department of the Environment, who has to manage protesters (the “99-ers”) that have taken over a park downtown. He discovers that the leader of the movement, Sarah, is an old college flame. Although Pete agrees with the 99-ers’ politics, Sarah calls him a sellout. On top of that, the featured speaker in the park, someone Pete idolized in his youth, turns out to be a “narcissistic fascist”—not unlike Captain America, the leader of the opposing “Redbaggers” group who “is always ready to make an appearance when there’s an opportunity to profit from it.” Meanwhile, Pete’s wife has secretly begun to suffer from Huntington’s disease. Needless to say, Pete has a bit of an identity crisis.
“The wife character is the only one that has a real problem,” Baughman says. “She’s the only sensible one, while everyone else is getting too wrapped up in stuff that doesn’t matter.”
Baughman’s story clearly takes inspiration from the Occupy movement and all of the reasons it failed, from the perspective of an aging flower child. But he’s careful to point out that he’s not talking about Occupy specifically. Instead, he’s referencing the hypocrisies of political zeal (there’s a homeless character who is ironically displaced from the park by “gentrifying” protesters) and the dangers of dichotomy. “I wanted it to be about people, and not dive into a political debate,” he says, noting that especially in our current, divisive political climate—the story takes place in Cleveland, after all—there are well-meaning people on both sides of any debate. Will they ever be able to work out their differences?
But politics aside, like in all rock operas, it’s the music that takes center stage. The tunes are varied, with traditional-sounding musical songs (“You feel like you need an insulin shot after listening to them, but you need them,” Baughman says) peppered with harder rock songs.
“I’ve learned how to work through genres without doing parodies of songs,” Baughman says. “Now that I’m older, I’m not tied to a specific type of music anymore. When I was growing up, music was your identity. It was rock vs. disco.” (Baughman obviously fell into the rock category.)
“The music is hugely important to the plot of ‘99,’” says Baughman, who also plays guitar in the show. “The guitar solos are characters, not just space keepers. There’s a guitar death solo in there, and it’s exactly how I’d want my own death be.”
99 A Rock Opera runs Friday through July 31 at the Silver Spring Black Box Theatre. Tickets ($15) are available here.
