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The Innocence Argument

96 Here’s the nub of the marriage of convenience in this production. Waits and Brennan saw more than Wilson did in Woyzeck, but they cared as much about making a good pop album as about making a good musical. Wilson trusted them to carry most of the burden of sophistication in the show because the prospect of his collaborators presiding over “separate little worlds” has never bothered him. (The raunchy number “Everything Goes to Hell,” for instance, carries the production’s most incisive statement about lying, and the oft-reprised ballads “Coney Island Baby” and “All the World is Green” build and maintain the whole emotional edifice about love that the plot knocks down.) It’s the old John Cage/Merce Cunningham gambit of parallel creation, inviting startling fortuitous conjunctions, only here the gambit becomes an alibi for half-baked dramaturgy. No one involved conveyed genuine passion for the work itself in the end — certainly not the kind of passion that sparks empathy with murder. Woyzeck thus became essentially an amusement, yet another case of entertainment trumping art, graphic design trumping language, and the synoptic pop song setting the terms and limits of the culture’s poetic aspiration. Esther Kaplan