Meet Me At Kenilworth

The Avant Garde Coffeehouse was a countercultural meeting place on 2111 North Prospect Avenue. From 1962-1968, the venue was home to folk and blues music, poetry reads, experimental films and performance art. UWM Theatre pays tribute to the venue this Spring with the premiere of Meet Me At The Avante-Garde--a musical/theatrical experience brought to the stage by the Theatre and Guitar students. 

Written by Fly Steffens, Meet Me At The Avant Garde tells the  story of the Avent Garde from two perspectives--the people that were there  at the time and the students trying to figure it out today. As executed by Steffens, the premise of college students today trying to connect up with counter-culture of the past is not nearly as tedious as it sounds, but it's far from being terribly insightful. Where this production makes its biggest impression is in the music itself. 

As a musical revue, Meet Me At The Avant Garde is actually kind of breathtaking. While the music itself isn't always executed with the sparkling brilliance with which it may have been written, it's an interesting historical retrospective on the music of an era. Folk and blues music mix in a fun fusion on a completely acoustic studio theatre stage. In '65 Dylan went electric. Somewhere midway through the production, we hear electric fro the first time and we get a sense of how beautifully jarring a transformation that really was. Towards the end of the show, we're hearing proto-punk acid rock and we get a sense of how far things have come--especially in a show that runs roughly 90 minutes without intermission. It's kind of an exhilarating journey.

There have been places like the Avante Garde all over the Milwaukee and all over the world since it closed. I remember sitting in places like  Rochambo and the Cafe Lava Java and Rory's Cafe in the '90s hearing people who were entirely self-taught perform music and poetry they'd written in the pulse of a kind of pre-millennial approximation of the Avant Garde . . . and there was a wild sense that anything could happen in the smoky atmosphere. With a few exceptions, we were all impoverished artists who were entirely self-taught trying to understand the world by interfacing directly with reality in a really primal way. While Meet Me At The Avant Garde is kind of a respectable tribute to that sort of spirit, it fails to capture the most fundamental aspect of the type of experience that it's celebrating. Because it's all scripted and pre-rehearsed. Because you know this is a guitar program at a University and all of the songs are iconic. The deliciously wild energy isn't there. Not that it needs to be. This isn't an attempt to re-create the Avante-Garde. This is an academic study of it. And it's not like it isn't fun.

Meet Me At The Avant Garde is a fun musical experience. As stated above, however, the dramatic end of it isn't terribly interesting. It's kind of fun to see Raven Dockery as a blues singer talking to Alexander Van Abel as a white kid who loves the blues. (Dockery has a great voice and lends a great deal to the production musically. Van Abel renders a sophisticated portrayal of someone looking for something more who becomes a doorman at the Avante Garde.) The contemporary end of the script is brought to the stage with an interesting dynamic by McCormick Sweeney, Liz Faraglia and Emily Rindt. There's a really compelling chemistry that seems to be trying to form between the characters and the actors in that end of the production, but it begins to feel synthetic and overworked where Steffens seems to be trying to draw it into larger themes. With the contemporary end of the drama, she's addressing the subject of art versus commerce in a way that parallels the history of the Avant Garde. In light of more organic and natural interactions between actors and characters in the contemporary end of the drama, Steffens' apparent thematic aspirations of the script feel kind of forced. 

The dramatic staging of Meet Me At The Avant Garde is at its best when it fuses with the music in a way that gives the performers room to breathe and find their own connection with the material. There's a lot of that going on here if you look for it. In particular, I loved the many faces of Kathryn Hausman. She's a  concerned conservative mother. She's also a record company executive. She's also a kid actually going to the Avant Garde. And when we first see her onstage, she's wearing sunglasses as Bob Dylan. She's Bob Dylan. Right out of college I shared an apartment on the east side with a man who, at the time, smoked a tremendous amount of marijuana and listened to A LOT of Bob Dylan. And I learned to hate the man and his music. Years later, I'm hearing Hausman sing Dylan and I'm starting to love it. I used to hate it and now I think I get it. A lot of that had to do with Hausman's unspoken attitude in the role. She's able to deliver the personality without speaking a word. Hausman's good. 

Other notable performances here include Zachary Dean in the role of a cook who was the heart and conscience of the coffeehouse and Glenn Widdicombe in the role of the entrepreneur who owns the venue. Things may eventually coalesce into kind of a weak and contrived ending, but it's gotta end somewhere. And with solidly representational performances by Widdicombe and Dean, the show manages to elevate itself above what feels in many ways like kind of an overly-rendered script. 

To be fair, Steffens' work here is much more accomplished than work that so often accompanies the typical jukebox musical. I wanted something more than that, though. Framing my expectations differently, this is by far the best jukebox musical I've ever seen. The genre is so often populated by scripts that are flimsy and schematic. Steffens' construction here is a lot more thought out than most of the rest of the scripts in the genre. The problem comes in where the milieu of the play concerns something much more free and open than some cheesy jukebox musical. That it's able to feel at all appealing in spite of this is quite a triumph on the part of Steffens, the show's director Rebecca Holderness and a talented student ensemble. 

Meet Me At The Avant Garde runs through May 5th at KSE 508 at Kenilworth Square on 2155 North Prospect Avenue. For ticket reservations, visit UWM's Peck School of the Arts online.