When I saw Adding Machine at the Minetta Lane theatre in 2008 I, along with the two girls sitting next to me, was laughing so hard I could barely breathe. I never could figure out why the rest of the audience was dead silent through the whole show. This play is hilarious, from its darkly absurd story, to Joel Hatch's deadpan portrayal of its crotchety hero to the grating, repetative music given to his grating, repetative wife. The cast recording is not easy to find, but I've managed to get my hands on a copy and I am sharing it with you in the hopes that someone else out there enjoys this as much as I did.
From Christopher Piatt:
Elmer Rice's 1923 Expressionist curiosity -- about a shlub accountant who gets pink-slipped, impales his boss with a bill file, goes to the chair for his crime, and travels through the underworld, only to learn he has to endure the whole lousy thing over again -- is currently drawing crowds to New York's Greenwich Village. The adaptation playing there is a new one, a musical even, but it's still very much Rice's original play in body and soul. And even though the play has often fallen out of the consciousness of the American theatre while less original works from the same period have held their grip on it, this most recent, celebrated comeback has landed The Adding Machine smack dab in the neighborhood where the company that first produced it originated.
Before it could return in this form, though, it had to lie dormant for decades, and, most important, make a crucial detour through Chicago.
The Adding Machine first found its way to the boards coutesty of the Theater Guild. A forward-thinking committee of bohemian tastemakers, Guild members organized themselves with the intention of producing contemporary, adult plays from the world stage. The group first assembled in the Village in 1919 before a degree of success drove it further uptown. The Guild's modus operandi was a relatively reckless approach: produce unfamiliar titles, cheerfully operate at a financial loss and jovially depend on amused patrons for backing or smitten theater landlords for rent leniency. Although the subscription-based Guild was a commercial organization, and in fact suffered from exorbitant taxes which nonprofit theaters would sidestep decades later, the producing environment in New York then was not unlike a good day in Chicago now.
Though vastly different in population and circumstance, old New York and contemporary Chicago could both facilitate wildly unconventional material, making Rice's bizarre play ideal for either. In Chicago today, the vast majority of theater, substantive and otherwise, is nonprofit. Like the Theater Guild of old, companies there have trained audiences to sign on for subscriptions in a transaction of trust: Give us the cash now, and we'll make plays for you throughout the year. Although this method is known to produce sluggish results, it's no different from any other theatrical ecosystem. Just when you think you've seen more clunkers than you can stand, something wholly new emerges and awakens your senses. In Chicago's 2006-2007 musical season, that "something" was Adding Machine.
Adding Machine played twenty-seven performances in a 150-seat theater in Chicago, mostly to the loyal subscription audience of Next Theatre of Evanston, IL. It surely would have extended its Chicago run had the space not been booked for the next offering in Next's season. Director David Cromer's production of librettist Jason Loewith and composer and co-librettist Josh Schmidt's adaptation was a daring presentation of an ugly American disenfranchised by technology. (Mr. Zero gets laid off because he's been replaced by the titular calculator; with his gastric ranting, coarse lethargy and bloated bigotry, this man discarded from the system could be Willy Loman's much more objectionable shadow.) Given the care, precision and unapologetic dystopia with which the creative team approached Rice's working-class jive text, Adding Machine was a natural candidate for an nextended engagement elsewhere.
Now transplanted to New York City's Minetta Lane, a new generation of theatre lovers is encountering Rice's world. Its jagged, amoral elements and sharply garish expressionism seem even more accessible perhaps than they did in 1923. Response from critics and audiences has been rhapsodic. And Adding Machine's timeliness has been much touted. "The show's starling, grim revelation turns out to be that what Rice had to say hasn't dated at all," noted The Village Voice. The New York Times concurred: "It radiates the unmistakable heat, the enticing light, of aesthetic inspiration... a vision of life in the 1920s at odds with the popular image as a happy-go-lucky era of boisterous good times. It is a vision that feels eerily in tune with our own unsettled economy."
Praise has enveloped the hit show thanks in no small part to the performance of the smashingly honest and intense Joel Hatch as Mr. Zero, wickedly grating Cyrilla Baer as the badgering wife, and the enchanting Amy Warren as the winsom object of his affection. (Her gawky Elysian Fields love scene with Zero is for the ages.) Showcasing the composer's vast versatility, tenor Joe Farrell as Zero's forlorn prison-mate Shrdlu, wails terrifically on a twisted gospel number, supported by a pitch-perfect ensemble.
Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt have paired the play down to a muscular, elemental libretto even slashing the nonessential "The" from the title, and composer Schmidt has freed the nervy music that seems to be humming just below the surface of Rice's text, aided immeasurably by his revolutionary use of the electronic keyboard. Rather than plugging it in as a tofu substitute for a full complement of strings and horns -- an unfortunate but popular trend of our new, more frugal American musical -- Schmidt utilizes the synth to create the jarring sound of electric current, a buzz of technological progress that haunts Zero even in death. And the numbers on the ledgers that Zero spends his days balancing become a grid for Schmidt's most complicated musical patterns. Not that the compose eschews every pleasantry of the traditional book musical; when called upon, he can forge a melody (glitzy in "I'd Rather Watch You" or heartbreaking in "Daisy's Confession") or tender duet ("Didn't We?") every bit as soothing and stirring as those of his songwriting counterparts a half-century ago.
This world premiere recording of Adding Machine is a cast album in the traditional sense, but it's also a more heightened recording of the straight play, produced in the elaborate radio-drama style that characterized pre-1950s airwaves. Schmidt and Loewith have created a musical that -- triumphantly -- doesn't sound like anything else that's come before it. To hear this recording may not be to hear a set of simple tunes one whistles fondly, but, amazingly, what can be heard is Elmer Rice's 1923 play. The Adding Machine is back downtown, home to many intrepid theatre lovers and stomping ground of those who were courageous enough to first birth it eighty-five years ago. Like its protagonist it's been reborn to go through the whole experience again.
Bad news for Mr. Zero, but great fortune for us.
Technical Information:
Composer: Joshua Schmidt
Librettist: Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt
Album: Adding Machine: A Musical
Year: 2008
Audio Codec(s): FLAC8
Encoding: lossless
Rip: EAC split tracks
Avg. bitrate: 716 kb/s
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
Bits per sample: 16
Channels: 2
File size: 384.85 MB
Length: 1:14:25
Musicians:
J. Oconer Navarro: musical director
Andy Boroson: piano/assistant musical director
Brad "Gorilla" Carbone: percussion
Timothy Splain: synthesizer/assistant to the composer
Cast:
Cyrilla Baer: Mrs. Zero
Joel Hatch: Mr. Zero
Amy Warren: Daisy
Daniel Marcus: Mr. One/Second Prisoner
Niffer Clarke: Mae/Mrs. One
Roger E. DeWitt: Mr. Two
Adinah Alexander: Betty/Mrs. Two/Matron
Jeff Still: Boss/The Fixer/Charles
Joe Farrell: Shrdlu
Tracklisting:
01. Prelude (0:45)
02. Something to Be Proud Of (6:51)
03. Harmony, Not Discord (2:51)
04. Office Reverie (2:00)
05. Movin' Up/In Numbers (2:29)
06. In Numbers (reprise) (2:20)
07. I'd Rather Watch You (3:46)
08. The Party (4:03)
09. Zero's Confession (8:29)
10. Ham and Eggs! (2:58)
11. Didn't We? (3:02)
12. I Was a Fool (2:00)
13. The Gospel According to Shrdlu (6:17)
14. Death March (0:55)
15. A Pleasant Place (1:53)
16. Shrdlu's Blues (3:17)
17. Daisy's Confession (8:43)
18. I'd Rather Watch You (reprise) (2:15)
19. Freedom! (3:10)
20. Freedom! (reprise) (2:58)
21. The Music of The Machine (3:23)
Adding Machine Megaupload Link