nytheatre.com review
Martin Denton · August 7, 2004

If you're ready to be bowled over by a music-theatre experience that's original, challenging, and explosively exciting, then head immediately to Fovea Floods' new production Bull Spears . I can't remember being so viscerally struck by a musical since Des McAnuff's Tommy ten years ago; Bull Spears ' creator, author-composer-director Josh Chambers, is an authentic visionary whose work should soon be making a giant impact on the face of American theatre. What makes it unique—and I'm choosing this word carefully—is that it's a musical with wall-to-wall music, but very few words. And it's a multimedia performance where live actors are far and away the most impressive and important component.

This show isn't like anything I've ever seen. It begins even before it starts: as the audience settles in, a silent movie plays on screens at either end of the stage, synched to a vaguely new-wave-y soundtrack. It depicts a group of young people walking through a field or down a road. Striking images catch the eye: one of the young men sits on a portico wearing a dunce cap; three more young men doff cowboy hats in unison; a mysterious hooded woman turns up. We have no idea why we're watching this arrestingly quiet, almost dull video. But we will.

The play proper is divided into three acts. The first takes place in the mythical town of Bull Spears, Nevada—a very rough cowboy town under the thumb of Horse Dick, a villain so vile that he's actually branded the barmaids. The action takes place in a saloon run by the voluptuous Milky Hills, and mostly concerns the night that a stranger named One Pump shows up, only to land in the crossfire of a brawl engineered by Horse Dick. One Pump resists fighting at first (in a lip-synched mod-faux-country-&-western song whose refrain goes, "I don't want to be a cowboy tonight"). But eventually he has to, and he prevails.

In Act Two, One Pump and Milky Hills have left Bull Spears for Stab Mountain, outside town. This spooky place is haunted by the ghosts of the people we saw in that video, and presided over by scary gargoylish creatures who seem to harvest snakes from their bellies. Another weird inhabitant, called Bonnet, gives our hero and heroine a task—to bring back the only living thing that grows on Stab Mountain, a single flower. Their nightmarish fairy tale mission puts them in grave danger, but again, they prevail.

The final segment is laid in Knife City, a terrible apocalyptic place run by a mayor called Roué who looks like a cross between Snidely Whiplash and Casanova. With a pair of fiendish assistants, he has repressed a good deal of the town's population, imprisoning some of them in a "rehabilitation" facility called the Auditorium. One Pump arrives to try to rescue one of the rebellious inmates and to try to find a hopeful future for Milky White's newborn baby (for nine months have passed).

The above synopsis can hardly do Bull Spears justice—in tableau after tableau and in precisely, thrillingly choreographed fight and movement sequences, Chambers and his cast do much more than merely tell a story; this show is finally more conjuration and evocation than narrative. Bull Spears is, above all else, a theatre experience that demands to be experienced; and though it trades in spectacular imagery (of birds, of knives and other weapons, of awesome destruction and cruelty), and though it is clearly about something (violence, American iconography gone terribly awry, the nurturing power of nature), it is at heart a visceral thing. Bull Spears reclaims musical theatre for the intellectually curious; its eclectic, genre-defying, rock-inflected score redefines musical theatre composition for a new generation. This is breathtakingly original material; not a trace of imitation Sondheim anywhere.

Of course, Chambers has not created this in a vacuum: Fovea Floods, the company he runs with co-artistic director Timothy Fannon, has been putting up extraordinary work for years now. Designers Jared Klein (lighting and video), Jay Maury (sound), Sue Kessler (sets), Leah Piehl (costumes), and Adam Fleming (animation) all make key contributions here, creating a world—or rather, three worlds—for this play that are mindblowingly vivid, particularly given the constraints of off-off-Broadway. Nine remarkable actors bring Bull Spears to life: Noel Joseph Allain, Linsey Bostwick, Tim Fannon, Justin Fayne, Richard Hawk, Sue Kessler, Rebecca Marzalek-Kelly, Cate Owren, Jane Pickett, and Will Schmerge comprise this formidable ensemble, all of whom seem able to rise to whatever task Chambers puts to them, from the dazzlingly complicated choreography (fight and dance) to the intense, deeply-felt moments of stillness that pull us up short from time to time here.

Alright, enough from me; discover Bull Spears for yourself and get excited about the future of musical theatre at first-hand. And to producers and artistic directors: take note. This is something special that merits your attention.