He Loved The Soft Porn Of The City
nytheatre.com review by David Hilder
August 17, 2012
He Loved the Soft Porn of the City is posited as a tribute to the late Danish composer Morten Skovgaard Danielsen. "Skovgaard," as he is called throughout the evening, collaborated with the musical group Moderno Trio, working with them in 2008 and 2009 on an opera. And then, four days after returning to Denmark, he killed himself.
The form the show takes, at least in its current incarnation, however, offers little illuminating insight into who Skovgaard might have been. Rather, it feels more like a concert performance of an avant-garde album of song with clear inspirations from the worlds of classical music and contemporary rock. With Kristen Williams introducing the show as well as playing keyboards and singing (she is much more comfortable when seated at her piano), Allan von Schenkel playing Skovgaard, guitar and bass (and singing as well), a substitute drummer (Albertstein von Schenkel in place of Moderno Trio's James Wesley Edwards) and another substitute, a dancer who joined the show an hour before curtain at the performance I saw, there is an abundance of improvisation and repetition happening on stage. While that can work musically—artists from Bjork to Sufjan Stevens to myriad others use repetition brilliantly—it makes for an opaque experience for an audience. A constant stream of video projected behind the players (some of it interesting, much of it banal) neither adds nor detracts, it just IS, like the rest of the piece. I came away knowing as little about Skovgaard as I did when I walked in—which is to say, nothing at all. The story of Skovgaard isn't really there; rather, it's a collection of moments—Skovgaard and a friend drive all night to Leipzig; the friend is in a strip club for 20 minutes but then comes tearing out insisting they flee at top speed; they are stopped by the police for speeding; they encounter a woman with a gun when they are looking for help; they hitchhike. All of this is in song, with a little dialogue thrown in once in a while. It's a perplexing experience, more of an event than a piece of theater.
But musically, there is a lot of very interesting work going on, even if more than occasionally von Schenckel and Williams seem to be looking to each other to find the way to the next moment. The lyrics seem to be intentionally unimportant; the music is the meat here, and much of it is pretty fascinating. You just have to work through a lack of story to get into it.
What's most clear about He Loved the Soft Porn of the City is that it will always mean a great deal to the people who wrote it and are performing it with total commitment. Alas, they have yet to find a way to communicate that meaning to an audience.
