By a stroke of fate, I was across the street from New York’s Dakota apartment building on December 8 1980, at the moment John Lennon was shot. Watching him being carried away, I felt a mixture of horror, sadness and guilt-ridden satisfaction: a tragic end would ensure that my favourite Beatle would for ever occupy a higher place in the pop pantheon than his band mates.
Watching Lennon, the Broadway musical that the director Don Scardino has assembled under the watchful yet much too proprietory eye of Yoko Ono, I experienced no horror. But there was sadness that this is little more than a potted, song- studded biography, and a quiet happiness at the chance to recall why John Winston Lennon moves me so.
None of the scenes in itself is especially evocative: the show’s book, written by Scardino, moves dutifully from Liverpool childhood to New York assassination, with theme-park stops at the Beatles’ 1964 invasion of America and pilgrimage to India. We move onward to Lennon’s life-stirring meeting with Ono, peace-promoting bed-in in Montreal and adventures in the US – especially the country’s chat-show scene – of the 1970s.
We reach the show’s nadir, with Lennon drunkenly heckling a Smothers Brothers appearance in Los Angeles with a Kotex stuck to his forehead. It is an all-too dutiful procession, relieved somewhat by the rear- projected video scrapbook of Lennon’s life and by the ability of an agile cast, of nine principals, to play the singer and (since the show is more about Yoko than George, Paul, or Ringo) his second wife.
The Lennon songbook receives quite a work-out here. Marcy Harriell’s rendition of “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” is searing and Terrence Mann’s “Give Peace a Chance” stuns with its topicality. And Will Chase, who plays Lennon most often here, is brilliant, capturing the man’s unique blend of spirituality, sexiness and naivety. If the musical fails on its own stitched-together terms, the songs tap into our collective memory bank in a way one need not be embarrassed to admit.
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