Music Review: ?The Capeman? Revisited, Far From Broadway Lights

In 1998 “The Capeman” disappeared into one of American culture’s black holes: it failed on Broadway. The musical’s songs — music by Paul Simon, lyrics by Mr. Simon with Derek Walcott — were put on a pair of good albums, one sung by the original cast and the other by Mr. Simon. But they were released before the opening of the blighted show; if anyone ever talks about those records, it’s usually with the prefix “the underrated.”

Songs From ‘The Capeman,’ with Paul Simon, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

One of the complaints 10 years ago about “The Capeman” was that the show couldn’t stop telling: too much story, not enough action. Its new, abridged format, “Songs From the Capeman,” which opened on Tuesday and runs through Saturday — the first of three ambitious weeklong segments of Mr. Simon’s music at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this month — corrects that problem.

It has little bits of staginess. Singers supplicate in an imagined church and dance at an imagined party. But the songs are presented more or less in oratorio form, cut free from the obligation to be theatrical. There are few props, aside from the cape and knife of the main character, sung by Frankie Negrón as a youth and Jorge Maldonado in reflective, jail-weathered middle age.

The narrative is about Salvador Agron, a Puerto Rican-born New Yorker who joined the Vampires gang and notoriously murdered two boys mistaken for rival gang members in 1959. The songs bounced among styles: folk aguinaldo for evocations of Christmas in Puerto Rican neighborhoods; Yoruba rhythm for a Santeria scene; guajira for gang talk; blues for threats from a fellow inmate; doo-wop to suggest innocence. (The genres keep converging too.) Some were unremarkable exercises; a few (“Bernadette,” “Can I Forgive Him”) were mysterious and beautiful.

On opening night the music was shinily rehearsed. Even reduced and without choreography, this production is no easy task: 17 regular singers shuttled among 10 microphones in front of the 14-piece Spanish Harlem Orchestra, led by the pianist and arranger Oscar Hernández. Some of the singers and players had been in the show’s Broadway version, including Mr. Hernández, Mr. Negrón and Claudette Sierra, who here is singing the role of the main character’s mother.

Mr. Simon was not one of the 17 regular singers. Of all the “Capeman” songs salvaged by the show, he sang only one, with guitar and minimal accompaniment. It was “Trailways Bus,” about Agron’s absconding from prison and heading west a few years before his eventual release in 1979.

“Trailways Bus” is about displacement: the song of a moody, marginal character. But Mr. Simon’s small, thoughtful voice gave it a counterintuitive power, as well as the lift it needed. One other problem with “The Capeman,” as you might find while fighting through this show’s second half, is that its narrative stays either dire, earnest or sentimental. (In the play the young Agron’s santero tells him he will suffer, and boy does he. The play is full of determinism, as well as its own kind of religious piety, in its rigid maintenance of these moods.)

The band played beautifully, and the singers were alert and animated, but pop-Broadway belting still doesn’t help the prescribed emotions of the story. It seems to need the complicated life force of a more rhythmic vocal expression: the style and invention that make a great salsa sonero — or Paul Simon for that matter — worth listening to.

The show opened with a treat: the doo-wop group Little Anthony and the Imperials, now four men in their late 60s, singing a cappella versions of their old hits. It ended with one too. Mr. Simon reappeared, singing his “Late in the Evening” with the cast and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra. The 17 singers circled around him, harmonizing and dancing, effusing and enthusing. Mr. Simon sang with understatement, looking a good deal more wary than the others.

Paul Simon: Songs From The Capeman continues through Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Musics Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, (718) 636-4100, bam.org.

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