‘Monk’ brings jazz legend to life in Rochester
How do you explain Thelonious Monk? “I’m enigmatic. I’m weird. I’m me,” Monk himself — or at least what all agree is a very reasonable facsimile of the jazz pianist — says from the stage.
That’s actually Rome Neal speaking in Monk, a one-man, off-Broadway show that Friday and Saturday goes even more off-Broadway, to the Radisson Hotel stage.
Thelonious Monk may have been enigmatic and weird, but to tell the man’s story it takes more than an actor putting on a whacky hat and imitating the odd mannerisms on display in the 1989 documentary Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser. Monk, who died in 1982, was actually a teen piano prodigy whose teachers, a recent Monk biography relates, quickly realized their student would soon surpass them. Jazz was slow to embrace his compositions, which frequently left odd spaces in places where listeners expected to hear notes, but by 1957 he was being hailed as a genius; Monk made the cover of Time magazine in 1964. Sixties racism, drinking and drug use weave their way through the story as Monk begins a slow decline into mental illness.
“You can label him whatever you want to label him, Monk is in the eye of the beholder,” Neal says. “As the person who has performed Monk for the past 10 years now, a lot of the weirdness has dissipated into a man who is a true artist, and had a sickness in his life that he had to deal with.”
Monk is the creation of Laurence Holder, who has written a handful of plays, many exploring historic black figures such as Nelson Mandela and Zora Neale Hurston, and even a drama in which communist sympathizers W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson come face-to-face with Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy in the midst of McCarthyism and the Red Scare.
The artistic director of New York City’s Nuyorican Poets Café theater program, Neal is Monk’s lead actor, co-director, co-producer and lighting designer. One thing he is not, though, is a piano player.
“Why did I get tagged to do this part?” Neal muses. “A lot of people say, ‘Well, you look a lot like him….’” He does.
“Monk was into fashion, and this character of Thelonious Monk,” Neal says. “And we’re both Libras, creative. Years ago, I was a fashion designer. I made weird clothes, skin tight, cut out the backs, show the chest and legs. I picked the idea from someone else and made it my own. That was my fashion call. His was hats.”
One Monk thing that Monk does not have is Monk music. Holder could not get permission from the estate to use it. So he turned to Bill Lee, who has scored for films such as Do the Right Thing and Mo’ Better Blues (anything to help out that kid of his, Spike). Bill Lee created a Monk-like soundtrack that Neal plays along to.
“The dancing, actually, I created, with the help of Bill Lee,” Neal says. “We create a little five-minute Monk ballet that we put into the play. Monk was known for getting up from the piano, to do his little dance thing. I thought it was appropriate, to do a little take on it. A ballet, no words, just movement.”
Despite the eccentricity, “Yeah, he was happy,” Neal says. “He had a beautiful family, a wife, Nellie, that he loved. He was around musicians, he played with all of the top people. He made jokes, he had fun with people.
If you go
What: Monk, a one-man play.
When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
Where: The Riverview Ballroom at the Radisson Hotel, 120 E. Main St.
Tickets: $20 and $25, or $10 for students, available through www.ticketweb.com or by e-mail at exodustojazz@aol.com. Check www.exodustojazz.com
Call: (585) 733-7685.
Web: www.monktheplay.com.
