The Capeman. - New York, NY - theater reviews

Progressive, The, June, 1998 by Margaret Spillane

When the most expensive Broadway musical of all time receives ferociously negative reviews and shuts down prematurely, why should anyone not within commuting distance of Manhattan bother to mourn its passing?

The quick answer is this: Because of the way the U.S. culture industry is built, opinionmakers in Manhattan play a disturbingly large role in determining which art, music, and drama the rest of the country will be allowed to enjoy. In many ways, the New York culture corps operates like the Washington press corps: While both strike the pose of hardboiled interrogator of authority, they're careful to ensure that no feathers get ruffled in the nests of entrenched powers.

The New York showbiz press corps crushed The Capeman, Paul Simon's magnificent and groundbreaking musical about a Puerto Rican teenager's odyssey from troubled child to murderer to "rehumanized" adult. Before The Capeman started previews last December, Paul Simon had spent seven years researching Puerto Rican art, geography, religion, and history. He teamed up with Nobel-winning Caribbean playwright and poet Derek Walcott. They wanted Capeman to do what no other Broadway show had done before: consider the fears and terrors and raptures of New York's urban poor at a human scale--not some giant icon of the downtrodden in the manner of Les Miz, and not the outsized exotics of West Side Story. They insisted that their depiction of New York Puerto Rican life would be recognizable to people who actually inhabit New York Puerto Rican lives.

The Capeman tells the true story of Salvador Agron, born in Puerto Rico in 1943 and raised with his sister Aurea in a poorhouse where his mother, Esmeralda, worked as a cleaning woman. When Esmeralda married a Pentecostal preacher, the family moved from the island to the housing-project canyons of New York City at a time when the naked hostility greeting Puerto Rican arrivals made them feel they were entering a war zone. They were. In all the impoverished ethnic neighborhoods of the city, street gangs patrolled their designated turf. Illiterate and dislocated, Salvador joined the Vampires, a Latino gang. One night in a mindless act of violence, the sixteen-year-old Salvador, dressed in a black cape, stabbed to death two Irish boys his own age--passersby with no gang connections--and became the youngest person in the history of New York State to be sentenced to the electric chair. Governor Nelson Rockefeller commuted his sentence following the intercession of Eleanor Roosevelt and others. After two decades of what the real-life Salvador described as "rehumanization"--including teaching himself to write, becoming a poet, and earning a college degree-he was paroled. He died of natural causes in 1986, at age forty-three.

Months before Capeman's previews, the press murmurs began: Simon was squandering money. A good piece of the show's $11 million price tag was an innovative extravagance. Early in their collaboration, Simon and Walcott agreed they would subordinate their lyrics to the storytelling power of the music itself. The musical cost a lot because Simon insisted that musicians be present, and therefore paid, every time the actors rehearsed--a practice unheard of on Broadway. He believed that, for the story of a culture to ring true, at every moment the storytelling would have to find its heartbeat in the music.

But the criticism went beyond murmurs about unorthodox rehearsal expenditures. Journalists stiffened at the prospect of reckoning with the difficult material of the story itself: the cause of violent crime among poor teenagers, the relationship between criminals and their victims' survivors, the practice of putting adolescents on death row, the now-forgotten goals of rehabilitation at a time when politicians label such people "superpredators." Tension heightened when several victims'-rights groups declared their opposition to a show they had not seen because they presumed that Capeman would glorify crime. In fact, the show deals in graphic terms with-the rage and pain experienced by the mothers of the dead boys--as well as the mother of the murderer.

Worse, the show didn't offer any monumental characters--no operatically strutting and anguishing Evita Peron, no stock Carmen Miranda spitfires like West Side Story's Anita. The scale of characters in The Capeman remained resolutely lifesize, providing a sense of the precariousness of each character's toehold, as they are assaulted by the countless perils to health, home, and reasonable expectations of predictability that the poor must grapple with every day. "Afraid to leave the project/To cross into another neighborhood," one character sings plaintively.

"There's a job as operator/I wouldn't have to wait for/If I could speak the language easily," goes another ballad.

The language of racial epithets is not a matter of daredevil poetry, as in rap music, to amuse or outrage. Here, the words sting. They are intended to make an audience wince.

Capeman is not a cruise through the make-believe barrio. It is a work of art that offers no opportunities for catharsis, but plenty of difficult questions.