Edgar Allan Poe’s <i>Nevermore</i>

Poe aficionados consider it almost a truism to say that Edgar Allan Poe's influence on literature spread further and deeper outside of his native land than inside it. But perhaps not quite so many of us were aware that a sincere and profound respect was harbored for Poe even in the chilly northern capital city of Edmonton, Canada, where the internationally respected Catalyst Theatre is based.In this crucible of creativity (Catalyst tours the world with its avant-garde productions), the many-hatted Jonathan Christenson (writer, director, composer, lyricist) has crafted a biographical musical of Poe, titled Nevermore, in the old tradition of musical biographies (leading from Annie Get Your Gun and The King and I to Evita to the newly surging Hamilton). Whatever other critiques one might have of Nevermore, one thing is clear: Christenson undertook extensive research on Poe prior to penning this production, and is largely faithful to the broad trajectory of the author's life. Consequently, Nevermore can serve as an entertaining and illuminating guide through Poe's world, thereby reintroducing the complexities of the man back into the New York City literary society from which he felt so unfairly rebuked.The conceit that sets this goth-punk musical in motion involves a traveling Poe, adrift upon a ferry on his way to New York to meet his fiancée. Upon this vessel, he encounters the fictional El Dorado Players, a theater troupe that will then proceed to recount his life to him as he journeys. By the end, the El Dorado Players—as their name foretells—explain to a distraught Poe that they were themselves mere creatures of his own imagination, characters who were always with him as he dappled the world with such ingenious creations as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murder of Marie Roget,” The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, “William Wilson,” and “Annabel Lee.” The El Dorado Players pay homage (sometimes subtle, sometimes blunt) to these achievements and more by Poe as they take us through his life from boyhood tragedy to mysterious death. Along the way, Christenson manages to insert oblique references to “The Black Cat,” “Israfel,” and other lesser known of Poe's works, thereby crafting a musical that is a delight for experts, but still not overbearingly didactic for casual viewers.Christenson begins Poe's biography with his mother's days as a successful thespian. We learn that Poe's father quit his legal practice to join Eliza on the stage, but never rose above bare mediocrity. His father's descent into alcoholism is then depicted as well, and a story of parental neglect unfolds, wherein we are told that Poe's brother Henry was largely in charge of child rearing. In such moments, we glimpse threads of an ongoing claim from Christenson that Poe's unrequited love for his mother, along with her stark death, may have served as the spark for all of his subsequent dark musings (though, in actuality, Poe's mother died when he was a mere three years old). After a perhaps mildly overwrought scene during which Eliza Poe dies, we learn of the children's separation into various foster homes, and the play then tracks Poe's life in the house of “Jock” Allan and the doting Frances Allan. Various set pieces—a devilish horse, a dark tapestry, a pendulum, a black cat—all frame the Allan household, adumbrating Poe's future literary productions. In one gratuitous piece of historical fiction, we learn that Frances (“Fanny”) Allan also chose to leave Poe, by jumping from the seventeenth-story window of an asylum. Readers of this journal will gripe that buildings could not achieve such heights by the time Frances supposedly committed suicide, to say nothing of the fact that she died from tuberculosis, but if narrative devices such as this allow the plot to attain a higher degree of tension, it seems an excusable veering from the truth.From here, the story moves onto his days at the University of Virginia, the falling out with Jock Allan and his second wife, a budding relationship with Sarah Elmira Royster, his friendship with Rufus Griswold, and various other critical junctures in Poe's life. Throughout, the El Dorado Players adroitly take on multiple roles, and sing both beautifully and compellingly, even if some of the material itself can occasionally feel reminiscent of some of Andrew Lloyd Webber's more commercial songs. But in point of fact, to my own amateur ears, this musical suffers far more from its unfortunate reliance on a canned orchestral score rather than live musicians. Surely, this decision resulted from entirely sound financial constraints, but it remains the case that the formidable skills and talents of both writer and singers can be lost among the tin of the soundtrack.Given its title, the production predictably reaches its climax with “The Raven” set to music, but with an innovative and striking twist. Christenson has nimbly intertwined verses of “The Raven” with a simple couplet from “Lenore” as a bold new refrain to an age-old classic, as different cast members tack seamlessly back and forth between the two famous poems. With the stroke of a pen, Christenson thereby forces the audience to consider the two poems in tandem, as one united paean to the lost Lenore. The audience is moved along its lilt as it gathers to a final, forceful crescendo.The denouement of the musical follows this number, depicting Poe's wandering last days during this “fever called living” and a “dream within a dream” (examples of the subtle homages embedded throughout this production), while we return to his childhood bedroom, where a ghostly Eliza Poe sits watch over his final moments, just as he supposedly sat watch over hers. As he expires, the El Dorado Players remind the audience of the original conceit, that the very life of Edgar Allan Poe can be viewed as “a play of hope and dread.” At the production I attended, the audience leapt out of their seats for a sustained standing ovation. The question is, then, if Nevermore itself can finally help break the spell cast on its illustrious subject—to be caricatured, or worse, neglected, by the countrymen who should be celebrating him. This musical production takes a bold step in trying to amend that fate, paying homage to Poe's diverse genius.

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