Photo by Hedi Slimane
If a small room contains 60 people and one of them is Courtney Love, then that room, in essence, contains one person. This is what I learned last night watching Kansas City Choir Boy, the musical-theatre piece starring Love, composer/playwright Todd Almond, and a small ensemble. Love mingled comfortably with the group and beamed at them, laughing, very much a team player, and yet her charisma exerted a powerful pull on the audience’s attention. When she entered the small space, the crowd reacted as if a cheetah had wandered into a museum cafeteria.
The hour-long musical drama was the capstone event of the Prototype Festival, a small but compelling music-theatre and opera festival in New York, and Love’s participation came about because of a shared agent and Love’s creeping burnout from rock performance. As she told the New York Times recently, "I got to that part where I’m looking down at the set list going, really, 'Malibu' next?," she recalled. "Are we halfway done yet?" Almond’s fleet, genre-agnostic score, which flits from Hedwig-style pop rock to electronic dance to crunching digital noise, offered her a shot to work on an intimate, arty project, one miles away from her tabloids-and-stadiums day job.
A great decision, it turns out: Love hasn’t found an outlet for her freakish preternatural charisma or vocal gifts this powerful in years. The work starred Almond as the titular Kansas City Choir Boy and Love as his teenaged girlfriend Athena, and the two of them were surrounded by a small cast of musicians and chorus members, who helped comment on the story and move it forward. On a surface level, Love nailed every twist and turn of the score, which was rooted in pop and rock but called for trickier bursts of rhythm and blocks of potentially stumble-worthy recitative. But beyond that, she reconnected with her primal power as an interpreter: With her wounded, moaning contralto, she dug up real emotions beneath Almond’s sometimes-glib score and hauled them, wriggling, to the surface.
If Almond’s character and Love’s character seemed truly in love and lust with each other, it was entirely due to Love, who wandered around with a swoony, giddy grin and seemed to be walking a half-inch from the ground. She laughed spontaneously at several points, curled up into a little question mark at Almond’s feet like a sleepy cat, and stared, transfixed, at the musicians, who played from chairs located in the audience.
Her singing pierced the earnest prettiness of Almond's rock writing and dug up emotions from within it. "I picked up a book and laughed at a sentence I knew you would hate," she sang in one song, arching her back and pointing a playfully languid finger at Almond. Save for a few of the effective staging tricks—at one moment, the chorus members fan out across the room and suddenly all appear sporting acoustic guitars—she was solely responsible for every chill and moving moment in the evening’s work. For all of her outward lunging, her most powerful asset as a performer has always been her sense of interiority—to be fixed with her thousand-yard stare is to witness a lifetime’s worth of conflicting emotions rise to the surface.
The story is told in murky broad strokes—basically, young love, adult disappointment, big city dreams, fond remembrances—but it opens somewhere strikingly specific. Almond, playing a composer fiddling on his laptop, looks up at his television and is stricken to see Love’s image on the news. She has been found dead in Central Park in NYC. His shock yields to reminiscence, and Love enters, beaming, from the back of the room, playing a figment of his imagination.
Little talismanic props—rave glowsticks, a grunge flannel—loosely grounded Kansas City Choir Boy in a time period, but the story is both timeless and slightly generic. What lingered, after it was over, was the intimacy—the room was so small that I was clocked hard on the right shoulder by a chorus member’s gesticulating arm, and when Love entered the scene, she was two inches to my right. It was a daring exposure for a punk artist who had never worked in musical theater, but Love deals in risky gambits, and this one paid off: She found an authentic note in every move she made.