You can’t help but be impressed with BOOM, which Rick Miller wrote, performs and directed—and, presumably choreographed, since no choreographer is listed. The title refers to the generation known as Baby Boomers, and the work he devotes to them is a retrospective covering the years 1945 to 1969.
That’s to say, you can’t help but be impressed with Rick Miller and BOOM at first. Yes, multi-faceted Miller is aided by lighting designer Bruno Matte and projection designer David Leclerc, who has an impressive way with holograms, but the fellow is otherwise alone on stage, forging his way through the quarter-century of events. If he doesn’t recall absolutely everything that happened through the tumultuous period, he gets around to a boggles-the-mind number of them.
You name it, and it’s likely here—the conclusion of World War II with the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki right up to and through the Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, early Richard M. Nixon administrations. As Miller is Canadian, he includes the passing political events there as well—and maybe even more so.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★★ review here.]
News footage of Martin Luther King on the fatal balcony is shown, as are girls carrying on over The Beatles. The range is wild—post-war Tupperware parties are included when a point is made about previously working women then sent back to the kitchen and bedroom.
Miller is narrating, but not simply. He also impersonates everyone whose face appears in Leclerc’s videos, most prominently his mother Maddie, Vienna-born family friend and eventually step-dad Rudi, and family friend and onetime Maddie-boyfriend Laurence. The idea is to have the latter three report on the experiences during a period when Miller was either not yet born or too young to recall proceedings clearly.
(Miller has already prepared BOOM X and BOOM YZ, which presumably reflect the years 1970 to 1994 and 1995 to 2019. The trilogy was originally meant to inform his two daughters about the events and traditions that have led them to where they are in their lives.)
A prepossessing BOOM element is the inclusion of popular music during the era. No less than 26 songs are included as sung by their popularizers. Well, not exactly sung by their popularizers. Miller impersonates every last one of them. That’s right, he’s the one heard on, for example, Hank Williams’ “Cold Cold Heart,” Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire,” and Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart.”
Often, Miller appropriates the songs to underline an irony. While he intones Perry Como’s “Till the End of Time” (the track that made the relaxed crooner a household name), a bomb pointed downward appears on the upstage screen. (It’s not identified as either the nicknames Fat Man or Little Boy.) Miller sends a similar implied message as Don McLean—er, Miller—vocalizes on “American Pie,” with its lyric about “the day the music died.” Things aren’t so subtle when he reprises Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” which, of course, wasn’t composed to be subtle.
So no denying Miller packs heaps of words, tunes and images into Boom. That may be sufficient for a project—produced by Kidoons and WRYD Productions—that keeps spectators’ attention for two hours, including an intermission. Others may simply register it as a fast-paced recent-history survey—not unlike a schoolroom report—gussied way up for Miller to arouse awe as newsreels flash, headlines blast, holograms pop up, Hit Parade numbers flare and he quickly dons and sheds period shirts, jackets and wigs.
Then there’s the question of his mimicry. For someone who’s put so much elbow grease into his all-but-comprehensive backward glance, he doesn’t seem to have listened back quite so well. He may have the initially reticent Maddie, the more voluble Rudi and amused Laurence down pat. There’s no way of knowing.
On the other hand, the first familiar voice he imitates is Perry Como’s, and he has it all wrong. Others he has trouble with only start when he takes on Winston Churchill. Perhaps he’s thinking that audience members who haven’t lived through the Boom Baby decades won’t know the difference. Nevertheless.
He gets somewhat closer with Nat King Cole and the unforgettable (by those who were listening then) “For Sentimental Reasons.” He sort of approximates Jimmy Stewart trying to make sense of a changed world in the 1946 It’s a Wonderful Life. He gets close to Elvis Presley on the 1956 “Hound Dog,” and the silhouetted hip-swiveling helps. Both the wig and the sound are wrong on Janis Joplin. Strangely, he’s spot-on with the 1960s Mick Jagger, Joe Cocker, and David Bowie.
It’s not Miller’s purpose to draw conclusions about 1945-70. He only wants to rediscover them. Despite that, he does indulge himself with one Saturday Night Live-like routine. He shows a clip from the famous (infamous?) Kennedy-Nixon television debate, the one where the latter’s sweaty upper-lip caused nation-wide recoiling. Instead of the then candidates exchanging their thoughts, Miller has substituted a funny discussion of the advisability of make-up. The sequence isn’t precisely worth the price of admission, but it offsets it a bit.
BOOM opened January 15, 2020, at 59E59 and runs through February 23. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
