Stephen King + John Mellencamp + T Bone Burnett = bloodless ‘Ghost Brothers’The Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, the long-simmering musical-theatre piece dreamed up by Stephen King, John Mellencamp and musical director T Bone Burnett keeps plodding on towards exactly the spot you expect it to go.
By: Ben RaynerObviously it would be tough to hang an entire play of any sort, let alone a musical, on a story about a killer washing machine or sentient 18-wheelers running amok or a mysterious mist swarming with Lovecraft-ian nightmare beasties – although, for the record, I’ll pay good money to see each of those productions if and when they happen – but did Stephen King have to rein himself in this much?
The prolific American horror auteur’s imagination remains relatively (and, no doubt, necessarily) grounded throughout The Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, the long-simmering musical-theatre piece dreamed up in tandem with heartland singer/songwriter John Mellencamp and musical director T Bone Burnett that finally made its one-off Toronto debut at Massey Hall on Tuesday night after some 15 years of on-again/off-again tinkering.
Oh, it’s got ghosts aplenty and a winkingly evil Satano-narrator doing a little extra haunting from the wings in the form of a catalytic character known only as “The Shape” realized with greasy aplomb by Chicago blues musician Jake La Botz, not to mention a fair amount of textbook-tragic onstage death.
But Ghost Brothers’ supernatural components are really just a spooky glaze over a kinda ho-hum Southern Gothic drama about two generations’ worth of battlin’ Mississippi brothers whose shared taste in femme fatales leads them to make some foolish and, yes, fatal decisions. Exceedingly familiar fatal decisions, at that.
You know where this thing is going long before any of its protagonists do, and when it finally gets there – about 45 minutes too late into a two-and-a-half-hour running time that bordered on torturous after the intermission – the twists thrown in to offset the improbable anti-climax are, well, even more anti-climactic.
It’s a Stephen King story, so you keep hoping for something more interesting to happen, maybe just that one ill-fated, bloody trip to a demonic laundromat (sorry, I have “The Mangler” on the brain tonight for some reason), but it all just keeps plodding on towards exactly the spot you expect it to go. And then on and on a bit more.
King’s script was inspired by a lakeside cabin his pal Mellencamp bought in Indiana some years ago rumoured to be haunted by two brothers and the woman they both loved. One brother was killed in a misguided attempt at William Tell-esque shotgun marksmanship, the story went, while the others swiftly followed him into the hereafter during a car crash on the frantic race to the hospital that ensued.
The plot extrapolates that sad tale from 1967 into 2007, when the two sons of the younger brother who witnessed his elder siblings’ demise 40 years ago arrive at the same cabin warring over a shared lady love of their own, with their parents – played in the current Ghost Brothers touring production by Twilight alumnus Billy Burke and Gina Gershon in white-trash drag left over from Killer Joe – not far behind and hoping to avert a similar fate for their own children.
Unbeknownst to all of them, everything they do is being watched by the three phantoms left over from the original tragedy and the ghost of a caretaker played by Eric Moore, whose character appears to exist solely to throw some big-voiced gospel gusto behind the pivotal anthem “Tear This Cabin Down.”
That’s how it goes, though. The plot is often just a plank for Mellencamp’s rootsy tunes, brought to life from stage right by a fine band featuring guitarist Andy York, drummer Dane Clark, upright-bassist Jon E. Gee and keyboardist Troye Kinnett while the entire, 16-member cast moves to and fro upon a bare-bones stage delivering their lines without set or props.
They’re pretty Mellencamp-y, those tunes, and some of them – the lingeringly mortal “And Your Days Are Gone,” in particular – are very good. Others, such as the forcedly uplifting closing chorale “Truth,” feel a bit too much like Mellencamp trying to pretend he’s not writing big musical-theatre numbers while doing exactly that.
Good or bad, he and King have crammed an awful lot of those songs into an already overburdened theatrical sprawl that didn’t need the padding. They’ve been hacking away at this thing for a decade and a half, so why stop now? Another edit or two wouldn’t hurt The Ghost Brothers of Darkland County because, tightened up, it’d be a fine way to kill an evening. And, hey, who knew Gina Gershon could sing?
Bring back the gore, though. It spewed and flowed freely during the original Ghost Brothers production debuted at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in 2012, but it’s entirely imaginary here, despite King’s assertions to this writer a couple of weeks back that there would be “a lot of blood.”
Sigh. C’mon, guys, throw the horror crowd a bone. Doing it radio-play style is noble on an artistic and conceptual level and all that, but a little splattering plasma wouldn’t hurt the payoff, y’know? Just sayin’. . .
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/music/2014/11/12/stephen_king_john_mellencamp_t_bone_burnett_bloodless_ghost_brothers.html
