Adding Machine - World Premiere Recording

Back in 1923, Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine was a powerful play, the only effective American contribution to the then-flourishing European dramatic movement, expressionism, with its various literary and pictorial-sculptural counterparts. It is the story of Mr. Zero, an average, blinkered nonentity of a man whose mind is so mired in the monotony and measliness of his life that he, and others around him, can only repeat and haplessly repeat their drab jobs, dreary existences, dismal expectations—cursed even in Paradise, from which their souls can merely flee.

Who would have thought that 80-odd years later someone could make a musical of this material—not an opera, mind you, a musical—albeit a highly unusual, almost operatic one. And not just like so many that, being in the rock idiom, think themselves daringly original.

But there is a composer named Joshua Schmidt, who, with a co-librettist called Jason Loewith, sat down in Chicago and made a musical of The Adding Machine. They dropped the The, making the whole thing a bit leaner verbally but enriched musically, and out came something bitter and beautiful, heartbreakingly sad and yet electrifyingly human, saying: Try, against all odds, to live, not just exist.

That is what they wrote, and that is what you get at New York's Minetta Lane Theatre, and now on CD. The world premiere recording of Adding Machine is very well produced, with the original cast and original director (David Cromer), and it seems to me that almost all the words and certainly all the music is there, as it should be with a nearly through-composed piece.

[IMG:R]There are only four members in the orchestra, manning a brilliantly hyperactive piano, percussion in all its variations, and a synthesizer. But this electric keyboard is used not for the usual schmaltzy orchestral impersonations, but in a lean, incisive, harsh, even eerie way, except when the text, a few times, goes soft, and the music fleetingly tender.

What range is here achieved, with the help of nine actors who can sing as keenly as they can act, either as soloists or as a chorus. We get everything from a kind of rap to a sort of chorale, gospel and blues, love songs and jazz. Often it is barely melodious, jeering, whining, threatening, as characters make messes of their lives and afterlives. But it can also turn touching with a melancholy beauty that doesn't let reality off the hook.

And the lyrics perfectly match the music—and story—in spirit. There are no clever or cloying rhymes, no leaping, lyrical imagery. It is all number-crunching, hardship-hugging earthiness, suffused with the barest hints of pathos, of sentiment stirring under the carapace of poverty, banality, drudgery, somehow moving in its simplicity, its striving for so very little, its ultimate helplessness.

The cast—performing just about as compellingly with their voices as with their entire stage presences—is wonderfully ordinary. These are not glamorous voices, not artful even when the going gets well-nigh operatic—at the utmost a kind of yell canto. They are the cries and croons of trivia-trapped human animals, seeking solace in beer or movies, tethered as much by conventional morality as by prospectless penury, and if, like the tragic Daisy (Amy Warren), yearning for some sort of transcendence, foiled.

Yet do not dismiss the work, or the CD, as depressing, or overcerebral, or nonmusical. Nonhummable, if you will, but with the hum of bittersweet everyday existence in words and music. Get the disc and see the show, then replay the disc, better with every rehearing. Adding Machine is undismissible.