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Queens Boulevard
(Re)makes Music and Dance
To hear him describe it, Charles Mee wrote a musical seemingly by accident.
"I've always used music and dance in my plays-or in lots of them, anyway," Mee told Signature Edition. "But this time it finally struck me that there is as much music and dance here as there is in a Broadway musical comedy. So, for the fun of it, I thought I'd call it Queens Boulevard (the musical)."
Mee often assembles his plays from texts he has found in literature, magazines, film, television, and the internet. The music of Queens Boulevard (the musical) has been selected in a similar collage-like fashion. The songs cover a range of popular music from the world over, much of which can be heard and discovered in the clubs and music stores of Queens. Like the borough of Queens, as well as Mee's plays, much of this music has been fused and mixed with a variety of cultures. The music of Okinawan folk musician Shoukichi Kina is heavily featured throughout Queens Boulevard (the musical), and Kina is known for his updating of Okinawa's traditional island songs by melding them with rock, jazz, and reggae. "I fell in love with Bollywood music long ago," says Mee of the music that has flavored and influenced the play. "And then, more recently, with the Okinawan folk music of Shoukichi Kina. I had that playing all the time I was working on the play. Down the block from the Jackson Diner [in Jackson Heights] is a music store that has a tremendous number of CDs of Bhangra music, which is a kind of folk music from Punjab but that has been taken back and forth from Punjab to Queens so that there is a lot of Bhangra music that is also a fusion of Bhangra and hip-hop and reggae-and that was playing all the time I was writing the play, too."
Director Davis McCallum adds, "Chuck likes to say that the form of this play might be what the American musical would have been like if it had been invented in Jackson Heights by someone from India. If it weren't invented by Rodgers and Hammerstein but someone who had come from another cultural tradition, it might have looked like Queens Boulevard."
However, Queens Boulevard (the musical) is not a musical in the traditional sense. Not only do the songs draw from a wide variety of cultures and styles, from Bollywood, Okinawan pop, traditional Gaelic, and Sri Lankan rap, they each function differently within the world of the play. "There's no consistent convention as to how the songs are used, each one invents its own convention," says McCallum. Aside from Bollywood, some of these conventions include lip syncing, karaoke, and one more realistic moment when a character sings in a bar in real time. "The songs in the play, with one exception, are not narrative," McCallum continues. "They're not telling whole chunks of the story. It's more like when people sing and dance at the important moments in their lives."
Like the music, the choreography will also reflect the many cultures existing and colliding within the show. McCallum envisions the play beginning with an Okinawan wedding dance (Okinawa is the homeland of the bride, Shizuko) which will riff on the tradition but not mirror it exactly. "We're transforming it and adapting it to a whole other purpose," says McCallum. "The Okinawan culture of Queens is different than the culture of Okinawa. There's an adaptation, mixing and cross pollination that's already going on. So we haven't tried to replicate in an anthropologically authentic way the cultures from around the world, but rather use them as a kind of springboard for telling the stories of the characters in the play."
To help unite and navigate these many styles and genres of music and dance McCallum and Mee have added a DJ (Satya Bhabha) who will be a fully integrated character as well as act as a guide to the audience and other characters. McCallum sees the DJ's purpose as fitting in not only with the world of the play, but reflecting Mee's methodology. "I think what a DJ does is sample and splice and pull in musical ideas from other sources and of course that's closely related to Chuck's dramaturgy as a playwright," he says. "It's also closely related to the kind of cultural salad bowl that is Queens. And so I felt that having a DJ would allow the various musical explosions and interruptions in the play to be contained in one gesture. All of the music the audience hears will come from the DJ. He's an overseer and a little bit of the puppet master of the whole play. He's spinning Shizuko and Vijay on their journey through Queens."
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