Theatre Preview
TIME AFTER TIME: THE CHET BAKER PROJECT
Crow’s Theatre
Starring Danny DePoe, Philippa Domville, Randy Hughson and Shaun Smyth
Written by James O’Reilly
Directed by Jim Millan
Presented by One Yellow Rabbit
Runs September 17 to October 4
Big Secret Theatre (CPA)
Under the category of junkie artists, American jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker (1929-88) holds a special morbid fascination.
Prodigiously gifted and movie-star handsome, he was also an incorrigible heroin addict who seemed to wilfully fuck up his life. His career charts as a stunning early climax, followed by a slow, sickening tailspin that a series of cures and comebacks couldn’t arrest.
Once considered the James Dean of jazz, Baker lost his looks, lost his teeth, lost his horn, did jail time in Italy and the U.S., was deported from Germany and England, ended up essentially homeless and hopeless, and finally, age 58 and still strung out, fell to his death from an Amsterdam hotel window.
Yet the irony is that, even as he burned out physically, his playing blazed ever brighter and, thankfully, continued to be captured on record. A haggard bum with a killing jones, Baker died at the top of his game.
"His later trumpet playing is great," says Danny DePoe, who stars as Baker in Time After Time: The Chet Baker Project, arriving in Calgary to open One Yellow Rabbit’s new season. "Although his singing voice got so damaged from pot smoking," he qualifies. "He was always stoned on pot as well as doing heroin. That’s what kind of makes him legendary – the fact that he was so messed up for so long and still managed to produce some really beautiful music."
The Chet Baker legend is explored in Time After Time, an original musical drama from Crow’s Theatre of Toronto, which was a smash hit when it premièred there at Theatre Passe Muraille in 2001 and has since toured across Canada. In the show, DePoe, a young Toronto musician and Baker look-alike/sound-alike, performs the music of the jazz great as well as portraying him in a series of dramatic scenes. Three other actors play the various people in his life.
Written by James O’Reilly, the intimate play forgoes the typical biopic approach to explore the difficulties of pinning down and explaining elusive figures like Baker. The musician’s tempestuous life is told through the eyes of Ted, a writer and Baker romantic who is trying, Citizen Kane-style, to track down the truth about the man.
DePoe himself did a little personality hunting to play the role of Chet, from watching the Oscar-nominated 1989 documentary Let’s Get Lost to reading Baker’s unfinished, posthumously published memoir As Though I Had Wings.
"I tried to get a sense of what he might have been like as a person," says DePoe. "It sounds like nobody could really get a grip on what his personality was actually like. You hear stories about Chet being the greatest guy and you hear stories about him being a jerk and the worst person. Which one is he? Both? It seems to me like he was, moment to moment, trying to have the most fun and score drugs. That’s mostly what his time and energy was spent on."
Of course, he wasn’t the first or last jazz musician in thrall to the needle. Before he became hooked himself, Baker, as part of the celebrated Gerry Mulligan Quartet, watched Mulligan get busted for smack and, not long afterward, saw the piano player with his own quartet die of an overdose in Paris.
DePoe believes there was a certain naiveté about narcotics at the time. "In the ’50s it was the thing to do and people didn’t know how damaging it was. Part of the appeal of heroin, I guess, was the escaping – being off in your own little world. I’ve heard people describe it as the closest thing you can get to (the feeling of) being onstage.
"When you’re onstage you’re in a zone, you know – the rest of the world is gone. When you’re playing jazz, improvising, you’re just going in the moment with things. I think a lot of the musicians went to it for a similar feeling."
That’s one bit of research DePoe didn’t feel the need to do. Musically, however, he’s immersed himself in Baker ever since originating the role for the Passe Muraille run. A trained jazz trumpeter who studied at Boston’s famed Berklee College of Music, DePoe says playing Chet’s licks wasn’t the toughest part of the job – it was the singing.
"I had never sung before I did the part," he admits. "So I had to do a crash course on Chet’s vocals. I exclusively listened to Chet singing for about three months, trying to copy him and figure out how he got the sound that he did."
In fact, while a superb instrumentalist, Baker is perhaps equally famous for his fragile tenor voice, which at its best brought a childlike vulnerability to romantic standards like "My Funny Valentine." And, just as Frank Sinatra claimed he learned his singing technique by watching Tommy Dorsey play trombone, DePoe thinks Baker drew upon his own experience with the trumpet. "There were certain ways about phrasing and the way he sang his vowels where he sort of used his voice as a trumpet. He played his voice like a horn, using air support and all these other things."
Time After Time marks DePoe’s theatre debut. He was chosen for the role after John Alcorn, a friend of Crow’s Theatre artistic director Jim Millan, caught him playing a gig at a Toronto restaurant. Since then he’s embraced his new alter ego, even recording an album, Setting Old Standards, that includes a couple of Baker tunes. "I can’t avoid sounding like him anymore," he says with a laugh.
For this touring production, he’s joined by a top-flight cast that includes Randy Hughson of Earshot fame as Ted, Philippa Domville as the many women in Baker’s life and ex-Calgarian Shaun Smyth in a variety of roles. (Onalea Gilbertson replaces Domville from September 23 on.) Backing DePoe will be local musicians Kodi Hutchinson on bass and Tyler Horby on drums.
DePoe says there’s talk of eventually touring Time After Time to the U.S. and, especially, Europe, where Baker spent a big chunk of his career. "I think Europe would love it," he says. "He was really popular there. I understand there’s even a plaque in Amsterdam for where he fell from that hotel window." |
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