On the day before Lennon, the new musical biography of John Lennon, began its world premiere engagement in San Francisco this spring, its hero was once again in the news. Eric Rudolph, the domestic terrorist responsible for numerous bombings, released a manifesto at his court hearing in which he denigrated as “despicable” Lennon's utopian anthem, ''Imagine.
'' Rudolph wrote that he had set off the murderous bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics to protest the “global socialism” of its theme song. That news made all the more poignant the first moments of the musical: a luminous projection of the shuttle Columbia in space backed by the haunting strains of ''Imagine,'' the song to which its brave - and ultimately doomed - crew awoke each day. Heroes and madmen: As Lennon makes clear, the pop singer and cultural avatar of peace and love would continue to influence both, more than two decades after his untimely death at the hands of another madman, M--k Da--d Ch---an.
''John was obsessed with finding the answer to the question, 'Are we greater than who we think we are? Is there a better and higher humanity?” says Don Scardino, who conceived and directed the musical, in which a cast of nine tells the story of Lennon's spiritual search using more than two dozen of his songs.
“His whole life was about getting rid of the blinders, of seeing through the bullshit. And when you do that, you're bound to inspire both love and hatred.”
The director and one-time actor says that John Lennon's universality led him to the show's Big Idea: All nine cast members, male and female, play the title role at one point.
(They also play a variety of other historical figures who crossed Lennon's path, from Paul McCartney to J. Edgar Hoover, from political firebrand Jerry Rubin to Queen Elizabeth.) Thus Marcy Harriell, an African-American actress, after singing “Woman is the Nigger of the World,” passes the role onto Terrence Mann, who at 53, is thirteen years older now than Lennon, sadly, ever got to be.
Ultimately it was this concept that won the participation and critical approval of Yoko Ono, Lennon's widow and an icon in her own right. “I thought John was too outsized a personality to be contained by just one actor,” says Scardino. “He really was Everyman.
Or rather, Everyperson. His struggle was our struggle, the struggle to be real, to be authentic. That's why he was so meaningful to people.
”
Indeed, since his death in 1980 Lennon has achieved such mythic status that it is somewhat reassuring to revisit him, as the musical occasionally does, as the John of Clay Feet: drunkenly heckling the Smothers Brothers with a tampon on his forehead, provocatively claiming that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ, or returning a Member of the British Empire (MBE) decoration to Queen Elizabeth to protest the Vietnam war and Biafran genocide – and oh, by the way, also because “Cold Turkey,” his song about kicking heroin, was sliding down the charts. Nice to be reminded that he could be as much of a jerk as anybody else.
“He may have been incredibly rich and famous but he was just as much a victim of the adage that most men live lives of quiet desperation,” says Mann.
“His confusion and insecurity fueled that search for the ineffable something, what it all meant and where his place in the world was. And yet no matter how big he got, he was never far away from being that working class kid from Liverpool.”
Lennon's hardscrabble youth – abandoned by his father, raised by his Aunt Mimi, a reconciliation with his mother Julia just a few years before she was killed when a drunken off-duty policeman ran her down – informed what Scardino calls “his dark side,” as well as his subversive sense of humor.
In his song “God” he bitterly denounced theism as “the concept by which we measure our pain.” The early traumas also fed his lifelong suspicion of authority and his own penchant for cheekily undercutting himself, as he did by equating Vietnam and his precipitous slide down the pop charts. As the prickly “conscience” of the Beatles – a chapter in his life which is dispatched quickly in Lennon in order to concentrate on his solo career – he appealed to the young rebels of the ‘60s generation.
Among the show's media projections is the famous picture of a teenage Lennon, sultry in a black leather jacket, displaying the unmistakable fashion sense he'd sharpen throughout his life. “He taught me that I had a voice and that I had a right to express that voice,” says Mann. “It seems obvious now but then it was pretty profound.
”
Lennon found his own voice and its bully pulpit early on, but it became amplified when he met Ono at a 1966 exhibition of her conceptual art. Lennon was taken with a piece that required climbing up a ladder to a peephole. Peering into it, one could make out the word “Yes.
” Lennon was instantly smitten and recognized a soul mate in this strange, screeching performance artist. The fearless Ono would initiate their journey into many of the cosmic mysteries that would impact both their lives and art. “In rehearsal, we would play that meeting with a sense of giddiness,” says Chad Kimball, who plays John opposite Julie Danao's Yoko in the scene.
“And Yoko told Don that at that moment they weren't so much giddy as shocked at the enormity of what was happening between them.”
Ono and Lennon set out to make their relationship into a global performance art piece. The couple staged famous “bed-ins” to which they invited the world's media.
What is most striking about these sassy affronts to the establishment – art happenings, frontal nude album shots, love-ins – is their sweet naïvete. Looking back from this bitterly polarized time, it is instructive that they invariably met the derision and catcalls they received with patience and good humor. “John and Yoko meant it when they said, ‘Hey, we're all in this together',” says John Arnone, the set designer.
“They could believe in these hard-line issues but they could also laugh at themselves and invite the world in on the joke. They never veered very far from their message of tolerance and forgiveness. Can you imagine what the right-wing power of this government would do to them if they were espousing these radical sentiments now?
God help them,”
Through Ono, Lennon developed more keenly – and joyfully – what would be the overriding spiritual motif of his last years: his message of personal divinity. “Who on earth do you think you are? A superstar?
Well, right you are,” he sang in “Instant Karma.”
As cosmic as Lennon's belief system became, Scardino says that he never lost sight of the personal. “John's story is the story of a man who wanted to become the best version of himself that he could be,” he says.
“With John, it started with the personal, then went on to the social and political and from the political to the universal. He never forgot that it was much easier to shout ‘Revolution!' than to take a good look a yourself.
”
That Lennon had come to some resolution in his personal struggle by the time he had his fateful encounter with Mark David Chapman is told in the show by the recounting, from transcript, of the policeman who was first to arrive on the scene. “You see, when someone is shot or wounded, an officer asks them some simple questions, you know, like, “What is your name? Do you know what year it is?
Who's the president?” said the cop. “But I'm too stunned.
Blood is everywhere. I'm looking at this man and that song [“Starting Over”] is on my mind and the sirens are screaming…Anyway, I finally say, ‘Do you know who you are?' and he says, ‘Yeah'.
”
That simple “Yeah” was the epitaph of a man born to a confused and angry world, who climbed the summit of fame as a pop superstar and ended his life in a way that had been the leitmotif of his foreshorted time on earth: by profoundly affecting a stranger.
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