Features :: GODS OF ROCK: THE BEATLES -- Why Don't We Do It in Broadway?

By The Luckdragon

It’s official. There will soon be a Broadway musical called Lennon, based on John Lennon’s life and work. It will have twelve actors playing Lennon at different stages of his life. The musical will also have two unpublished songs, “India, India”, and “I Don’t Want to Lose You” that Lennon’s second wife Yoko Ono has given to Don Scardino, writer and director of the production.

Perhaps the greatest tribute one could pay to the Beatles is to prove just how much people can make of their songs, not only in terms of the music, but also the ideas, films, and books that have developed around their work and their lives.

A few months back, in a one-of-its-kind article in History magazine, Mikhail Safonov argued that the Beatles had done more for the break-up of totalitarianism in the USSR than Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, and that their music stood for everything that questioned suppression.

Perhaps John would not have cared much for such inferences. When asked about the ‘Aeolian cadences’ in “It Won’t Be Long”, he replied that he didn’t know what the hell they were, they sounded like exotic birds. But then, Paul said in his Playboy interview, about “Back in the USSR”, “It was also hands across the water, which I’m still conscious of. ‘Cause they like us out there, even though the bosses in the Kremlin may not. The kids do. And that to me is very important for the future of the race.”

Czech director Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) said in an interview that the Beatles brought down the communism.

“Suddenly the ideologues are telling you this is decadent, these are four apes escaping from the jungle. I thought I’m not such an idiot that I love this music and suddenly these political ideologues were strangers.”

Another uncanny example would be the both famous and infamous ‘Paul is Dead’ string of rumours. In the late 1960s, certain fans began circulating the rumour that Paul McCartney had been killed and had been replaced in the band by a look-alike called Billy Shears. Although the Beatles denied such rumours, fans tried to prove, through song lyrics, and “clues” on the album covers, that it indeed was true. These clues were so convincing that when making Vanilla Sky, director Cameron Crowe said that he was greatly inspired by these rumours to try and walk the thin line between reality and illusion that he was exploring in his movie.

Apart from the Broadway musical, a film on John and Yoko could also be on the cards, with Ewan McGregor rumoured to play John Lennon.

Watching movies on the Beatles today, along with the ones that the Beatles themselves starred in (A Hard Day’s Night in particular) years after Lennon’s death, one is struck by how wrong the critic Roger Ebert was when he said that even the presence of all the albums and the fact that the other Beatles were alive did not matter, after the death of John Lennon. Ebert sweepingly dismisses the work of the other three. And what’s more, the Beatles’ work keeps reinventing itself.

The idea of a play and even a movie on John Lennon comes on the heels of what has been a collection of films on the Beatles, which have explored a few premises outside the beaten path of chronicling their history.

The first movie to be made on the Beatles was All You Need is Cash (1978), a hilarious spoof on the Beatles by Eric Idle of Monty Python fame. Among other brilliant gags, it portrays Yoko Ono as Hitler’s daughter. George Harrison makes a cameo as a journalist. The film also spins a hilarious parody on the ‘Paul is Dead’ rumour:

Stig, meanwhile, had hidden in the background so much that in 1969, a rumor went around that he was dead. He was supposed to have been killed in a flash fire at a waterbed shop and replaced by a plastic and wax replica from Madame Tusseaud’s. Several so-called “facts” helped the emergence of this rumor. One: he never said anything publicly. Even as the “quiet one,” he’d not said a word since 1966. Two: on the cover of their latest album, “Shabby Road,” he is wearing no trousers, an Italian way of indicating death. Three: Nasty supposedly sings “I buried Stig” on “I Am The Waitress.” In fact, he sings, “E burres stigano,” which is very bad Spanish for “Have you a water buffalo?” Four: On the cover of the “Sergeant Rutter” album, Stig is leaning in the exact position of a dying Yeti, from the Rutland Book of the Dead. Five: If you sing the title of “Sergeant Rutter’s Only Darts Club Band” backwards, it’s supposed to sound very like “Stig has been dead for ages, honestly.” In fact, it sounds uncannily like “Dnab Bulc Ylno S’rettur Tnaegres.” Palpable nonsense.

The relationship between John Lennon and Brian Epstein was explored in Christopher Munch’s offbeat short, The Hours and Times, in 1991. The film stars Ian Hart (who recently played Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in Finding Neverland) as John Lennon.

In 1994, Ian Hart reprised his role as Lennon in what is perhaps the most successful adaptation of the Beatles’s story, Backbeat.

John and Yoko: A Love Story was made for television. The movie is memorable for Mark McGann, who gives a scintillating performance as Lennon, and looks so much like him that it is scary.

Most recently, Two of Us (2000), starring Jared Harris as John Lennon and Aiden Quinn as Paul McCartney, shows what might have happened had John Lennon and Paul McCartney met up and spent a whole day together in 1976 at Lennon’s New York apartment.

There have been so many other fictionalised movie accounts of the Beatles’ story, including In His Life: The John Lennon Story, which explores Lennon’s childhood from the age of 16 to 24, with Philip McQuillan as John Lennon and Daniel McGowan as Paul McCartney, and The Birth of the Beatles.

Unfortunately, most media reports gave movies like Two of Us a thumbs-down, saying that the lives of famous people have been sufficiently ‘what-if-ed’ on film. But a lot of interesting movies that are due for release have imagined realities driven into them. Finding Neverland (2004) imagines how the writer J M Barrie would have been inspired to write Peter Pan. Capote (2005), with Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote, will focus on Capote’s unraveling of the plot for his ‘nonfiction novel’, In Cold Blood, and will feature Harper Lee as one of its characters.

While on the subject of the media and the terrible manner in which they approach the arts, here is an excerpt from an article published in Chennai’s most popular newspaper, on a recent tribute concert for the Beatles held in the city.

It’s commercial. And, with anything that is commercial, people can connect. After all, they’ve heard it not a thousand times, but a million. It’s a comfort zone.

I read the news today, oh boy.