CONMAN: A Musical Apocalypse
Imagine April Fool’s Day, 1860, as a river boat travels down the Mississippi and through America’s divided heartland in this musical adaptation of Herman Melville’s darkly satiric novel, The Confidence Man, His Masquerade, with a libretto written by Joseph Boone and music composed by Benjamin Boone.
Follow the mysterious Con Man as he boards the Fidele at daybreak and assumes multiple disguises to carry out his schemes: blind mute, black minstrel singer, pious man of God, woman of easy virtue, and, ultimately, impresario in charge of the evening’s masquerade ball.What happens when the Con Man finds his shenanigans disrupted by three runaways stowed away on the river boat this very day?
An escaped slave trailed by his crazed master, an abused youth pursued by his politically ambitious uncle, and an unhappy wife pursued by the leader of a Transcendentalist cult—all three runaways eventually find their fates in the hands of the Con Man as the hours tick by and irrevocably approach midnight in this scathing, yet humorous, political allegory of a nation on the brink of apocalypse. The musical score mirrors the Con Man’s use of various guises, drawing on and upending multiple musical genres and American vernaculars that range from riverboat banjo and blues to hymnals and ballads. Haunting contemporary electronic backing tracks run through and connect the entire production, which in turn is framed by the modernist musical soliloquies of the Con Man that evoke the existential nature of his situation and of America on the brink of destruction.
Robert Vorlicky served as dramaturg for this collaboration. CON-MAN had its first staged reading and production by The Riverside Opera Ensemble at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, New York City, 15-17 Jan. 2004 (2:45 hours in length) starring Keith Butterbaugh and directed by Steven Pickover. It had its Los Angeles premiere at the USC Gateway Theatre, 23-25 April 2010 (1:30 hours in length) starring John Fleck and directed by David Schweitzer.
Preview/trailer video: https://vimeo.com/128420558
Creative PR supplement by USC undergraduates: https://vimeo.com/11065483