Paul Simon

Songs From Capeman

myopic and unimaginative--a very shabby work

Review Score:

(2/10)
You know, a good musical COULD have been made of this bit of history, if its authors had thought to make that musical about good and evil (as in Hemingway's short story "The Killers", for example). Or a good musical COULD have been made about racial prejudice in America with a different bit of history. The obvious problem is that Simon picked the capeman's bit of history for personal and subjective reasons and then went searching (vainly) for a point. Even so he might have found a VALID point, or alternatively, he might have declined to make the piece didactic or pointed at all and just indulged his subjective whims.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with using the particular four-letter word (begins with "f") that Simon uses over and over and over here. But it's obvious that Simon is trying to get more dramatic leverage out of single word than a single word (especially this one) can possibly give any dramatist. Simply put, he is using it for its shock value; he is using it cheaply and ineptly.

"Songs from the Capeman"'s music is probably a statistically reasonable sampling, so to speak, of "Latin" and "doo-wop", but this is just what makes it so drab. Let's hear, instead, some ORIGINAL, ATYPICAL "Latin" and "doo-wop". The performances here are energetic and accomplished, but the songs themselves can serve artistically only as "source" music. (In other words, they would work fine in a--non-musical--film if they were depicted as playing in the background, say, in a bar or on a car radio, etc.)

More Reviews: