By Chris Willman

Entertainment Weekly, December 12, 1997

Paul Simon is “putting it together”, as another notoriously brainy Broadway songwriter, Stephen Sondheim, once described it. Come January, Simon will have made a little bit of history by being the very first singer-songwriter from among rock & roll slim pantheon of uncontested greats to open a serious original musical on Broadway. Which might seem like an altogether long-overdue rite of passage for those of us from the generation that came of age listening to both ‘The sound of music’ and ‘The sound of silence’, but putting those two camps together took a few decades.

Looking as coolly unrelaxed as anyone on the verge of opening a risky $11 million musical ought to, Simon pulls up a couple of folding chairs inside the Manhattan rehearsal hall where an orchestra is taking a lunch break between last-minute arranging sessions for ‘The Capeman’, the production for which the 56-year-old pop legend is creator, composer, co-author, co-lyricist, co-producer and inadvertent controversy prompter. As the hundred-odd musicians file-out, I remind Simon of how much intrigue this show holds for those of us who consider ourselves rock & roll enthusiasts and devotees of the Broadway musical. Not that there’s necessarily a huge overlap between those two audiences.

“I’ll say,” Simon interjects, “there’s virtually none. You may be the overlap.”

Well, it’s not quite so lonely as all that. But he does have a point: most rock nerds and theatre geeks part ways somewhere around junior high, and rarely again do the twain popularity meet. When a supposed example of newfound common ground is seized upon, it usually turns out to be either nostalgia satiation, like ‘Grease’!, ot the Who’s ‘Tommy’, or catchy hepster hokum, à la ‘Rent’. For all the claims of the musical theater’s revitalization, “I don’t think it’s changing,” says Simon, “not much.”

Once rock emerged, he figures, “theatre music never absorbed that energy, and rock & roll became the mainstream of popular music, while theatre became this other branch of pop music. Whereas in its heyday, the ‘40s and ‘50s, it was the same composers writing for both the Top 40 and the stage.” Sad how that schism came about, isn’t? “I don’t see that as a tragedy. The cream-of-the-crop writers of new generations didn’t have any interest in [theater]. I’m sure Lennon and McCartney could have written a great musical if they wanted to. But why bother when you can have a satisfying experience making an album and then go on the road and –David Bowie is the first name that comes to mind- be as theatrical as you want?”

Why, indeed? Simon has just made a surprisingly compelling argument against the whole idea of “rock opera”. Shouldn’t someone be calling the box office to cancel previews right about now?

Relax. Fortunately, the now-pejorative “rock opera” scarcely begins to cover ‘The Capeman’’s reach –though Simon’s 39-song score does rock, in its fashion, and the story is rendered operatically with almost no spoken dialogue. The show doesn’t take many direct cues, either, from classicists like Rodgers and Hammerstein, Loesser or Lerner and Loewe, all of whom Simon admires.

What it is, then: a lively tragedy with an almost all-Latino cast… with doo-wop, salsa, and country rock foremost among its epic, breathtaking array of period musical styles… and with heady matters of justice, forgiveness, and accountability as its primary themes. Above all, it’s the true story of Salvador Agrón, a cape-clad gang member who in 1959, at the age of 16, murdered two white teens on a New York playground, sneered from the front pages of tabloids that he didn’t care if his long-suffering mother watched him fry (for public outcry, think the “nanny case” times 100), and subsequently lived out most of his life in prison. With all these overtly commercial trappings, it is a wonder Lord Lloyd Webber didn’t get around to it first.

Bur seriously, the fact that Dostoyevskian doo-wop may not be the easiest sell despite Simon’s marquee value is borne out by a couple of figures. There’s the pricey show’s $5 million advance ticket sales, not unpromising but hardly in ‘The Lion King’’s reportedly $40 million league. Then there’s No. 42 chart debut, two weeks ago, of ‘Songs from The Capeman’, an album Simon has released of his own recordings of 13 of the show’s songs. The record’s sluggish first-week sales suggest that many Simon fans mistook it for a cast album and not a true successor –seven yearslater- to his multiplatinum ‘The rhythm of the saints’.

Even rave reviews may not draw the gold-card holders among Simon’s fan base into a story about a thug on death row. As Simon moves downtown to the Great White Way, he could leave much of his flock figuratively behind on Central Park’s Great Lawn, the scene of his most spectacularly mass-attended triumphs in 1981 and a decade later, in 1991.

Weeks before its opening, the show is already dogged by controversy, though whether that’s a box office blessing or broadside is hard to say. There are those who object to a musical even being written about a convicted murderer. Last week, a victims’ rights group, ‘Parents of murdered children’, announced their plan to mount a “large protest” on opening night and organize a nationwide write-in campaign addressed directly to Simon. Flak is also coming from voices in New York’s Latino community, one of the show’s most sought-after audiences. The play’s three leads –Marc Anthony (as the young Agrón), Rubén Blades (the imprisoned Agrón) and Ednita Nazario (as Agrón’s mother, Esmeralda)- are all major Latin music stars, specially the teen idol Anthony, whose sellout Madison Square Garden concert in September was a pre-Broadway send-off. But support for a production that puts authentic-sounding aguinaldos and other indigenous styles in front of a mass audience is outweighed in some quarters by a story line that, however true to life, allegedly perpetuates stereotypes. Puerto Ricans are at the forefront of a Broadway show for the first time since Bernstein and Sondheim did it 40 years ago, the thinking goes, and they’re knife-wielding gangbangers again?

“Have a little faith,” says Anthony. “I don’t doubt that there are gonna be people offended; it’s a very powerful story,” the 29-year-old heartthrob allows. “But at this point it’s futile to protest if you don’t know what the message is.. People go ‘Oh, West Side Story…’ And I’m like, ‘West Side Story’? You haven’t heard one note, and you already know that I’m gonna contribute to setting my people back another 20 years? Please.”

Less vocal now, but bound to get louder , are those who accused Simon of being a cultural imperialist when he appropriated African rhythms for 1986’s ‘Graceland’ and Brazilian beats for 1990’s ‘The rhythm of the saints’. Derek Walcott, the Caribbean-born, Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Simon picked to coauthor Capeman’s book and lyrics, figures he should have as righteous a perspective as anybody on his collaborator’s adventures in exoticism. “All this accusation of ripping off other people’s culture is nonsense,” Walcott fumes. “When I play ‘You can call me Al’, which is pure calypso, that’s the beat of my music. The fact that somebody from New York wrote the lyrics doesn’t bother me. It’s not that he’s a chameleon. It’s not that he tries to be black or Brazilian or Puerto Rican or South African. It’s that his voice is there within that culture –and he’s there as a visitor.

“If I hadn’t found that,” Walcott insists, “I wouldn’t be working with him. I wouldn’t have collaborated just for the sake of a Broadway show. And I wouldn’t work with any other –what do you call it… pop artist. I don’t want to sound conceited. But I knew from Paul’s work that there was more to come from him; that he was close to an American opera, because his songs are both colloquial and large in scope. He deserves the effort at a masterwork.”

Despite being pestered by pals for years to write a musical, Simon swears he “never thought it would be interesting… until I was on tour with ‘Graceland’.” Something about that celebrated jaunt’s ‘Rolling Thunder Revue’-gone-world beat communal vibe planted a seed. “I thought, ’Well, here’s Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and I sing, and then we sing duets, like different characters in a show’ –a show that didn’t have a story, just a theme: South Africa. But I thought, ‘If I saw this in a theatrical setting, I’d like it.”

The muse thus alerted, the idea that became ‘The Capeman’ was quick in coming, though the writing and financing weren’t. Motivating him, in part, was the thought that the story could be a framework for his great musical loves, present and past.

“The doo-wop,” he says, “was a big attraction.” In some of the first act’s most indelible numbers, Simon gets to give a genre that didn’t survive the early ‘60s its last shot in the 20^th century. “No, it didn’t survive. It’s become a little cul-de-sac of rock –or some people even consider it prerock- but it wasn’t, it was the beginning.” The connection is personal. “It’s the first music I sang; I used to stand on a corner and sing in a group. Now I’ve completed a cycle, I think.”

He’s less open to discuss why the themes inherent in Agron’s story drove him through the seven years of difficult work and painful dealings with investors and collaborators to get ‘The Capeman’ to the stage. Obviously Simon, like most of us, is a sucker for a good redemption story: is there reason to believe even a double murderer will be received in Graceland?

Speaking of redemption, perhaps, too, he identifies –if just a bit- with the plight of someone doomed to spend a lifetime paying for the indiscretions of youth. As his high-profile feuds with Art Garfunkel and recent dismissive comments about the acclaimed new Simon & Garfunkel boxed set, ‘Old friends’, bear our, Simon seems to regard the fame he achieved as the writerly half of the ‘60s superduo as an albatross to be ritually shed again and again through the most purposeful stylistic reinventions. On some deep, difficult-to-get-at level, you can call him… Sal.

Simon’s old life as a journeyman pop star is nearly as distant to him as a Agron’s teen years were to him when he was finally parolled at the age of 35. Indeed, working on the musical has put him in a valedictory mood –though he now backs off from earlier suggestions that ‘Songs from The Capeman’ might be his final album. One thing he is clear about: “I’m not gonna go on the road again”, he says, plainly meaning ever.

He’s not concerned that the ‘Capeman’ album won’t be, commercially, another ‘Graceland’. “Big sales and No. 1s, they belong to young generations. The Rolling Stones –that’s unuuusual,” he adds, drawing the word out in his undeliberately droll way. “If Bob Dylan has an album that is successful, as I heard his last album was, that’s unusual, out of my generation. And even when I did in recent years have albums that were big hits, they didn’t have big singles. That’s fine; that’s just how my work evolved.”

In fact, with Dylan as an arguable exception, Simon is probably the only legend among rock’s fiftysomethings who hasn’t spent most of the ‘90s coasting –who can be seen struggling to produce a latter canon that’s equal to or better than the work that established him. The irony is that now –since his1992 marriage to singer Edie Brickell, with whom he’s raising their two young children, Adrian, 4, and Lulu, 2- Simon, the great soul-bared bard, is trying to top himself by avoiding confessional writing.

“I feel that I’m at the peak of my skills,” he asserts, “so it’s not like I don’t have anything to say. But I don’t particularly want to say anything about my private life.” There are precedents, I suggest; others known for using their art to work through churning neuroses have suddenly turned outerdirected once they settled down. Not that we should infer that marriage and kids automatically confer happiness…

“It does, though,” he interrupts. “It does make me happy. Most –all- of the albums that I wrote were always some search for me to find out what was on my mind. But [now] many of the subjects on my mind have to do with my family, and I don’t want to talk about it. In fact, I have a distinct aversion to talking about it. It’s a privacy issue.”

The musicians are filing back in –classical violinists mingling with Spanish guitarits, an odd and tipically Simonesque mix of, as Walcott puts it, the colloquial and large-scale. “It’s unusual to have a Broadway show that has a great band,” Simon says, brightening as he rises to confer with ‘The Capeman’’s musical director, Óscar Hernández. “I mean, nobody ever says ‘Let’s go down and see such and such a show because the band is incredible.’” Theater history in the making, maybe, again. Hernández raises his hands and the pit orchestra is suddenly awash in one of ‘The Capeman’’s bittersweet Nuyorican boleros, the beautiful sound of Simon’s sublimation.