Adding Machine: A Musical

Amazon.com Musicals are not all big razzamatazz enterprises playing on the Great White Way. The remarkable Adding Machine is a somber, modernist chamber work that opened in Chicago in 2007 before a successful Off-Broadway run, the following year. Based on Elmer Rice's 1923 expressionist play, the musical centers around antihero Mr. Zero (Joel Hatch), a number-crunching drone stuck between a surreal soulless office job and a drab home life. It's simply amazing that this downer premise could turn into such a compelling show. Successfully melding vocals that range from theatrical to semi-operatic with synthesizer-heavy arrangements, composer Joshua Schmidt has come up with a series of weird little art songs. This is not "fun," escapist music; it demands the listener's full attention, and does not shy away from harshness and dissonance, making the oases of beauty all the more compelling, and the rewards all the more satisfying. Is this what a David Lynch-penned musical would sound like? -- Elisabeth Vincentelli Product Description Hailed as "a brilliant musical: jet black, uncompromising and remarkable" by the New York Times, ADDING MACHINE inspired some of the most rhapsodic reviews of the 2007-2008 theatre season. Featuring a score by Joshua Schmidt and liberetto by Jason Loewith and Mr. Schmidt, ADDING MACHINE is a darkly comic yet heartbreakingly beautiful adaptation of Elmer Rice's incendiary 1923 play. The astonshing score gives passionate and memorable voice to this stylish, stylized production. Review Elmer Rice's 1923 Expressionist classic The Adding Machine influenced a good deal of 20th-century endeavors (it even has a 1969 film version with Phyllis Diller!), but the prospect of a musical that crams its three-hour abstractions into a distinctive, coherent 90-minute work seems a Herculean task, no? Not for Joshua Schmidt and Jason Loewith, the creators of Adding Machine, a brave, brilliant re-imagining of Rice's tale of Man vs. Machine. It centers on the hapless, deadpan Mr. Zero (marvelously played by Joel Hatch), who learns that after a quarter-century as a bookkeeper, he's getting the boot in favor of advanced technology, sending him on a surreal tour through imprisonment, death, and even afterlife where Mr. Zero discovers the true nature of his being. Directed with chilling acuity by David Cromer, who also helmed this production last year in Chicago, Adding Machine gives off an effect a little like being trapped in the coolest '80s music-video fever dream imaginable. With nods to seminal works like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and lit with a speakeasy smokiness, the work is unsparing in its angst, yet never defeating especially in the stirring scenes between Mr. Zero and his co-worker/soulmate Daisy (Amy Warren, in a richly emotional, heartbreaking turn), whose unlikely romance suggests a slanted Sondheim. You have to work a bit to fully derive this musical's pleasures and many will not want to but it rattles in your brain long after you've left the theater. Grade: A. --Entertainment Weekly
ASIN: B0017T269G
VSKU: DBV.B0017T269G.G
Condition: Good
Author/Artist:Original Off-Broadway Cast
Binding: Audio cd
Note: Any images shown are stock photographs and product may differ from what is shown.
Condition Notes: Individually inspected: Guaranteed to play perfectly or your money back. Case may show wear and may be in library packaging. Ships Fast!