Here’s possibly good news for those of us grasping for any assurance as artificial intelligence (henceforth AI) seems poised to take over the world and leave actual humans moping on the sidelines, wondering where the next meal is coming from.
The not-exactly-welcome offering is Artificial Flavors, an improvisation piece put together by the usually reliable Civilians artistic director Steve Cosson with cast members, in alphabetical order, Michael Castillejos, Aysan Celik, Trey Lyford, Jennifer Morris, Heath Saunders, and Colleen Werthmann.
Their chosen task in this enterprise — which stretches only a few more than 75 minutes while seeming longer — is to use AI (ChatGPT and the like) for creating a new musical. Sure, improv actors running up spur-of-the-moment musicals is hardly new to the stage, but this is evidently the first AI-improv musical at a time productions about AI on any topic are being raced to the boards as fast as lemmings stampede to the cliff’s edge.
For starters, Cosson takes some time to introduce himself as “Aging Homosexual” and lays out the evening’s proceedings. There’s an opening number (“Synthetic Harmony”), which is not especially good and doesn’t lend much promise for the quality of the ensemble’s vocal quality or the choreography, which, perhaps fortunately, is limited to this number. Then the respected Cosson goes to his laptop to type in AI prompts while the cast gets underway. Much of the script decisions are determined by shouted audience suggestions or taken from ideas written on collected sheets of paper.
Then the hot-off-the-presses musical begins in earnest, which is both the good news and the bad news, of which more later. The music offered on the night this reviewer attended was about, among other things, a male-female weight-lifting competition involving a mongoose, and, if I remember correctly, a small dog. The outcome: tedium.
No need to go into the unfunnily convoluted plot, enhanced (?) by Attilio Rigotti’s projections. That would only test review-readers’ patience, which had already been sufficiently tested on me and my companions by Cosson and the game gang. Incidentally, Cosson himself does mightily approve of what’s occurring, often spouting encouragements such as “brilliant” and “great.”
Requiring more discussion, however brief, is the dreamed-up AI score (!?) — lyrics AI supplied, music entirely made up by tireless musical director Dan Lipton. Sung in solos, duets, and groups, every ditty is exclusively made up of rhymed couplets. Eventually, every song sounds like the one preceding and following it. (I heard no one humming a single earworm while exiting the theater.)
The long-winded result, which is where the good and bad news coincide, demonstrates evidence — anecdotal as it is — of AI’s inability to put alive-and-breathing composers, lyricists, and bookwriters out of business any time soon. That’s the happy consolation for sitting though Artificial Flavors, which, on the other unapplauding hand, does raise the question whether Cosson and cohorts deliberately intend to send this calming message. Probably not, though it comes across all the same.
If anything, the new musical offered while I was on hand did give Saunders and Castellejos, sometimes fingering a drum device, the opportunity to show off genuine vocal pipes. Good for them.
Note: At no point is it mentioned that even if ChatGPT does produce a musical on the level of Show Boat, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, A Chorus Line, Ragtime, or Hamilton, real live actors — not hotshot bots — will still be employed, as they are here, if to little avail.
Toward the final curtain of the new tuner fobbed off on my benighted night, one of the created characters said — thanks to AI prompts — “Do you think I would be involved in something so ludicrous?” Sorry, but you and your fellow performers just were.
Artificial Flavors opened October 27, 2023, at 59E59 and runs through November 19. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
