In anticipation of his October 6 cabaret with collaborators Carolyn Braus and Erin Granfield, we sat down with composer and company member Andrew Earle Simpson to find out more about his history and his upcoming program.

 

Not only are you an experienced composer with our company and a member of our company, but now we are featuring you as a cross-disciplinary artist and presenting your work composing and playing for silent films. Where did your love of cinema begin?

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I’ve always loved movies and I’ve always had a particular fondness for classic movies, so I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t enjoying movies for the stories that they tell. When I moved to Washington, our friend Maurice Saylor really got me into silent film in a way, and I saw the musical possibilities in this magical way of telling stories with movement and gesture and pacing—music is an indispensable partner to it. Music was a way to partner my own work in theater previously with my work as a musician. It was kind of an ideal marriage for me, and since then it’s been an amazing ride.

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Cabaret combined with film is kind of different ways of telling stories – one live, one on the screen – and I think the film blends that together too because even though it is a silent film, there’s lots of music in the film. There are several spots within the film where there’s a song and dance number happening, or there’s a revue where the main character becomes a star who plays saxophone with a whole band behind her kind of like a Ziegfeld Follies situation. It’s just an exuberant film, and it really is kind of a musical, and the song, “Suzy Plays the Saxophone” gets featured more than once, and we’ll play it during the film… there’s lots of music and theater in the film which is about music and about theater.

 

Say a little bit more about why this film is a good opener for our Weimar Cabaret season.

 

Of course the film comes from the time of the Weimar Republic. It was made in 1928, so we’re really coming to the end of the Weimar Republic, and the cracks are showing. It is an exuberant picture – Anny Ondra is the main character, and she worked with Hitchcock on a couple of silent films. She was the leading lady of Blackmail and a film called the Manx Man. She married a boxer named Max Schmeling and he was at the time they were working in Germany and they found themselves favored by the Nazi regime even though they didn’t collaborate in any way with them.

 

In the movie, it’s the ending days of the Republic and the show is talking about the Weimar period. The movie deals with two friends. One of them is an actress, and the other is from a noble family. Both are being sent to England. Susy is sent to work as a “Tiller Girl,” which is something akin to the Rockettes, but her noble friend Annie is being sent to a strict boarding school. They decide on the boat over that they are going to switch identities, and so Susy the actor becomes Annie the Noblewoman because she doesn’t want to be an actor anymore, and Annie loves the theater so she becomes Susy. The film is all about Annie (the new Susy)’s journey. She learns to play the saxophone, she has all these musical numbers, and she’s great in the film. She becomes this major star, but there’s a complication when the actor’s mom recognizes that she is not the real Susy, and of course there’s a love interest thread in there as well, and a lot of the film flips on this idea of mistaken identity.

 

But also there’s so much music in the movie, and it’s about women being in the front and taking over the roles, while the guys in the band are behind her. It is set in this period of the closing years of the Weimar republic, and there’s a kind of urgency in that. There are two cabaret songs that I would like to do with my collaborators, the chanteuse Erin Granfield and saxophonist Carolyn Braus: one is called “Throw out the Men” from the Reichstag, like chuck’ em all out, which totally fits the story, and then there’s another one called “Masculine/Feminine,” and then there’s the Saxophone Susy song itself. We’ll have some discussion at the end where we speak a little bit to our own time. After the Weimar period, the artists were condemned as decadent, but what is the artist’s role today? How do art and music and theater artists express freely as authoritarianism edges ever closer? We may have something to say about that. I hope we’re not in a parallel situation, here, but we may be getting there... There may be a little something original in there, too, that speaks to our time.

 

Join us on October 6 for our Cabaret Series Season Opener, Suzy Plays the Saxophone with Andrew, Carolyn, and Erin!