Songs in the Key of Public Life

Calling strangers on the telephone usually involves repeat spellings of this reporter’s obscure last name, a phonetic translation (Ho-eh-nah-dell) and a ritual delay while they practice it aloud or make a few jokes.

Yet on a recent afternoon when I phoned songwriter John Forster at his home in South Nyack, N.Y., to interview him about his underground hit “Both Barrels: A Salvo of John Forster Songs” currently at LunaPark, not only did he have the pronunciation down, but, he told me, he’d already written a Hohenadel song.

In his drawer, he explained, is a children’s tune he wrote a few years ago, about some grade-school classmates with the hilarious name of Hohenadel (yep, that would be my dad and Uncle Rick). “It’s modeled on ‘Our Gang,’ but there’s a haunted house and the Hohenadel family moves in,” Forster said in his deep, wry voice. “I had fun with the kids and the name. It’s a kind of Hohenadel fantasia.”

Six degrees aside, the unlikely coincidence says something about the retentive mind of this musical satirist. His “Both Barrels” is a musical cabaret in which a cast of five sings, dances and acts out 20 miniature one-act rhyming nonlinear musical plays. Topics include modern love ballads like “Way Down Deep (You’re Shallow)” and “Codependent With You,” a torch song for the 12-step set. Born from yesterday’s headlines, “In the Closet” ridicules the Clinton administration’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. “The PACman” is a rap-style roast of political and tobacco company hypocrisy. “The Tragique Kingdom” mocks Disneyland Paris as “the theme park only for the French,” with “Nostalgialand” and “Intellectual Land . . . with a Jean-Paul Sartre labyrinth that asks you why you are here. . . .”

“I’m like a cultural trash compactor,” says Forster, 50, of his influences, naming everything from Sondheim to opera to Frank Zappa. He keeps copious notes on life, he says, never knowing when he’ll need them. Songwriting, he says, “is the way I process reality.” But that process often takes some time. There are no Monica songs yet on the playlist. “I can write on deadline like lightning,” he says, “but my songs tend to evolve over a period of time. They’re sort of topical and they’re not. Stuff interests me as it floats by; a lot of times I have to think about it for a while.”

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Forster began writing songs at Harvard, where he founded the long-running satirical revue “The Proposition” and wrote for Hasty Pudding Theatricals. He moved to New York and began writing musical revues, songs for his own traveling one-man show and children’s albums. In the early ‘90s, he finally recorded some of his unusual brand of musical satire on Rounder Records (“Entering Marion,” 1993, was followed by “Helium,” 1997, and “The Official Bootleg Album” in 1998).

He is most often compared with lyricist Tom Lehrer. “I want there to be more people,” he says. “Because you really need three people to make a trend--and I’ve been dying to be part of a trend.” Why is he so alone in the musical world? “I think because it’s a style of thinking rather than a style of music,” he says. “There is no one style of music that I work in, there’s no chart in Billboard for what I’m doing; there’s no category in the Grammys.”

Still, he’s just received his first Grammy nomination as a co-producer of Tom Chapin’s children’s album “In My Hometown,” an arena in which he also likes to work. “When I’m writing a song for children I remove all the sex, and I replace it with violence,” he says. “That’s my rule of thumb.”

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To turn his motley list of songs into the 70-minute “Both Barrels,” Forster turned many of the solos into duets and ensemble pieces, writing in harmonies. For the director and the actors, it meant finding a way to dramatize each song and develop characters where once there was only a man and his piano, doing all his own accents. During the process, Forster came to Los Angeles to sit in on rehearsals.

Members of the cast say he was a good sport. “I found him to be so flexible and generous with allowing us to play with his pieces,” says actress Elisa Surmont. “And he can compose on the spot--he’s got this wonderfully acrobatic mind.”

When the show opened in October, says actor David Naughton, “we were terrified. There’s no real through-line; each song is a separate performance.” He says Forster was poker-faced in rehearsals. “He’s a thinker, so he’s not a real demonstrative, boisterous guy. You’d never suspect this guy could write this stuff. He looks like a math professor--you know, tweed jackets with the elbow patches, glasses and a shock of gray hair. He’d be a great contestant for ‘What’s My Line?’ ” But in the end, Naughton says, the actors learned to trust the material. “His stuff works and [the audience will] get it,” he says. “Our job is just to tell the story.”

Actor and “Both Barrels” director Paul Kreppel has known Forster since they did improvisational theater together in Boston in the late ‘60s. “I’ve always felt connected to his material,” Kreppel says. “I haven’t found anyone who doesn’t appreciate him. Even if you don’t get it,” he says, admitting that there were “several things I had to look up.”

Forster says he “loves the cast” and enjoyed the collaboration. “I’m not a control freak,” he says. “I get tired of my own limits as a performer. Performing is really fun, but I don’t need to do the songs 100 times.” The new material, he says, “is written to their strengths. I’m doing a piece that’s very Zappa-esque with a close harmony, something I wouldn’t think of doing for myself.”

“Both Barrels” is in an open-ended run at LunaPark, and plans are in the works to take a production to the off-Broadway Lucille Lortel Theater in May. And that, they hope, is just for starters.

“I think this show could be done anywhere,” says Forster’s longtime friend and producer Sandy Faison. “Why not Boston and Chicago and even London?”

For the New York opening, Forster is writing some new material to bring the show up to an hour and a half. “I gave up cigarettes 15 years ago and it’s hard,” he says of the writing process. “Cigarettes help you rhyme.” But the toughest thing about writing, Forster says, is finding the right tone--especially when aiming your double barrels at such a sensitive array of topics.

“ ‘Both Barrels’ hit a tone that is not vicious; it’s more good-natured than I thought it was going to be,” he says. “I’m not attracted to viciousness. I’m more interested in ideas than in being personal. It’s easier, but the dish part isn’t really what interests me, because it’s gone in two months from now.”

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“BOTH BARRELS: A SALVO OF JOHN FORSTER SONGS,” LunaPark, 665 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood. Dates: Fridays-Saturdays, 7:30 p.m., except dark this Friday. Indefinitely. Price: $15. Phone: (310) 652-0611.