FALLEN ANGEL
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Fallen Angel is about one of those people. His name is Will, and he has a band and a trunk full of songs. The problem is, they all sound like other people’s songs. His unimpressive retreads of 1970s groups like Heart, Cold Blood, Bob Seger’s Silver Bullet Band, Edgar Winter’s White Trash, and Fleetwood Mac aren’t bad, they’re just not very good.
Unfortunately, the same is true of Will’s story, at least as it’s told in this “rock and roll play” by Billy Boesky. Unabashedly autobiographical, Fallen Angel is theater as therapy: Will, Boesky’s alter ego, grapples with psychologically crippling anxiety about success and failure as he tries to stir up record-company interest in the Fallen Angels, his band. But like the songs Boesky has written for Will, Fallen Angel tells an unexceptional story that, despite intermittent laughs and an occasional touching moment, isn’t particularly memorable or significant, except perhaps to the man who wrote it.
To its credit, Fallen Angel offers some diverting and crisply played if insubstantial music, mostly by Boesky; it goes rather well with a beer or two in this cabaret presentation. (Don’t expect to be able to hear the lyrics, though; they’re mostly buried in the instrument-heavy mix, for which blame must be shared by musical director Steve Postell and sound designers Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen.) And director Rob Greenberg, who previously staged the play at New York’s La Mama ETC, has fashioned a few nice stage moments: the illusion of a rushing subway train created by flashing lights and clattering drums, a very lovely sequence in which Luke and Gretta sing under starlight while a silhouetted, rejected Will provides acoustic guitar accompaniment, and a touchingly played reconciliation between Will and his father, effectively portrayed by Michael J. Twaine.
