Gil Hates Everything

This is a jukebox musical featuring songs by Johnny Cash. (And possibly others – Windows Media Player kept giving me composer information about some of the songs, like I would know. I’m not at all an expert on country music, not even a novice… I just tend to avoid it on uninformed principle. After all, if you start to know your enemy, there’s a danger he’ll become your friend, and this is country music we’re talking about ;-)

My prejudices thus on the table, I can tell you that apparently this show doesn’t have a plot as theatre convention would recognize it… which is certainly one way to approach the question of “what do you do, now you’ve acquired the rights to an artist’s songs and need an excuse to perform them all on Broadway”. A minimalist way, and not, it seems, all that successful – the show lasted a month on Broadway before going on tour, and most of the reviews I’ve found have panned it.

These being theatre covers, we hear some rather unlikely voices at work, which may or may not have been how Cash was hearing the songs when he wrote them. As usual with covers (although, ironically, see the last paragraph) I’m not at all convinced by how a lot of this sounds, and it’s half-tempting to seek out the originals, because the songs themselves, if you can get past the awful presentation, are kinda interesting. Some of the (presumably older) ones are lyrically twee, and I’m not sure that I needed to hear thirty-nine of them in one go. But there’s a lot of humour both above and between the lines, and some reasonably powerful stuff, particularly in the second act.

It sounds like this made for a rather bad musical, but the soundtrack wasn’t in any way appalling to listen to, so Random Panda is giving this six out of ten pieces of bamboo on that basis, and on the understanding that you probably shouldn’t actually go to see the show.

The soundtrack opens with “Hurt”, on which special topic a few words are required. As I trust you can see from the video, this is a tour de force in pop video history. It’s actually a Nine Inch Nails song, written by Trent Reznor at age 28, but Cash steals it, in one of the last creative acts of his life, and sounds like he’s opening up his entire life, using song as blade. Whenever they do a “Top 100 Videos” show, the commentators, particularly the men, observe that this is the video where wives and girlfriends all ask their men “Why are you crying?”. Partly it’s because of how Cash looks, a physical horror that’s familiar to anyone who’s said a goodbye in a cancer ward. Partly because of the shameless but terrifically effective time-machine video. And partly because Reznor’s lyrics are devastating: how we feel hurt is how we live, our empire is dirt, and everyone goes away. But what also has to be remembered is: if you can feel pain, you are still alive, whatever else it means. I don’t know whether “Ring Of Fire” is told (insofar as that word applies) in flashback, but even if not, “Hurt” has to appear at the beginning of the soundtrack. It would be too terrible to bear if it was at the end. The ultimate lie of art is that we can have happy endings, and it’s such a wonderful lie, we should believe it as often as we can.

(originally posted 2009)