Bring In the Noise

When John Crozman was in his 20s, he’d stand on his head and play the violin. The Canadian-based musician, now 38, no longer performs his novelty act. But that same antic spirit and athleticism are at the heart of a show that Crozman and four colleagues created five years ago in a dusty storage room in downtown Calgary called “Barrage.” The show, which plays Wadsworth Theatre on Saturday, is determined to set the traditional notion of a violinist on its head.

“I don’t advocate people standing on their heads,” Crozman says. “But we really wanted to push the limits, to break all the stereotypes that people have about fiddles and violins.”

Indeed, the tattoos, piercings and midriff-bared tummies one finds among the dozen young musicians that make up “Barrage”--including seven violinists and two actors--are as unexpected as the music. Much of the music, composed and arranged by Dean Marshall, owes as much to Mozart as to Metallica, to Celtic music as to country and calypso, to klezmer as to classical. Neither does one expect a percussionist to bang on four violins at once with chopsticks nor for the violinists themselves to jump around while playing. Paganini was never like this.

“Barrage,” currently on a 21-city “teaser tour,” is the latest entry in what might be called the “Riverdance” or “Stomp” Sweepstakes. In its bid to plow the lucrative field of the entertainment spectacle phenomena, “Barrage” has company that is every bit as quirky. “Blast!,” which just completed a six-month North American tour after opening in London in December 1999, hits Broadway in April with what one perplexed English critic called “a maniacal sendup of weird college campus activities.”

Like “Barrage,” “Blast!” is out to break stereotypes. In this case, those relating to marching bands, a discipline that arguably has not been in vogue since the days of John Philip Sousa. While “Barrage” started out in the Calgary Rockies, “Blast!” came roaring out of the Midwest and the subculture of drum-and-bugle corps international competitions.

Since its world premiere in London, “Blast!” has scored everywhere it has played with its 52 young musicians zipping through classical and pop standards while tossing off precisely choreographed feats of physical dexterity. “It’s pure razzle-dazzle Americana--as if Busby Berkeley and Florenz Ziegfeld had risen from the dead,” noted British critic Roger Foss.

“John Philip Sousa was the Beatles of his day,” says Jim Mason, the 47-year-old artistic director of the Star of Indiana, a drum-and-bugle corps whose successes at international competitions sparked the idea for “Blast!”

The show brings that outdoor pageantry indoors, embellished with theatrical values. “What we’re trying to do,” he says, “is interpret the music from a contemporary, visual point of view, with an athleticism that surrounds our culture.”

Skeptics might cynically dismiss “Blast!” and “Barrage” as nothing more than “Riverdance” wannabes. While Mason and Crozman acknowledge that non-book shows such as “Riverdance,” “Stomp,” “Tap Dogs” and “Blue Man Group” have paved their way, they also point out that their respective shows were organically in development for years. “I wouldn’t have been interested in developing ‘Barrage’ if it was just a knockoff,” said Crozman. “That’s just the easiest peg to compare it to.”

The roots of the show date back to the spring of 1996, when Crozman and four colleagues--Dean Marshall, Anthony Moore, Jana Wyber, Larry Saloff--formed 5 to 1 Entertainments, which would launch “Barrage.” The partners had backgrounds in music education, mostly relating to the violin, as well as in arts administration, and they set about creating what Crozman called a “contemporary violin/fiddle project.” “The violin is not a very sexy instrument,” he says. “But we felt that it could be, with all kinds of music, uniquely composed and arranged and presented.”

After being invited to perform at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1996, 5 to 1 tapped former students for the project. As the troupe gained momentum, they auditioned more than 100 candidates, eventually settling on seven violinists and/or fiddlers, six from Canada and one from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

During 1996-99, “Barrage” toured North America, Canada and Europe, often in small theaters, community centers and school auditoriums in rural towns. “It was our grass-roots training ground,” Crozman says. “We persevered through really tough times.”

That perseverance was rewarded in the fall of 1999 when “Barrage” played at a Detroit high school, where Diane Bliss, a PBS television executive, attended with her son. Impressed, she suggested to Crozman that the show would fit in with the Detroit PBS station’s programming. However, the group would have to finance the special itself--and do it on speculation. 5 to 1 ponied up the $200,000 to produce a 45-minute television program, which aired in Detroit, under the local PBS auspices, in March 2000.

Later, “Barrage” performed at a dinner at the PBS convention in Palm Springs, which led the program to be picked by 431 independent stations and aired during fund-raising drives in December 2000. (The show is likely to be repeated in many markets during this month’s fund-raising drives.) The PBS special attracted the kind of attention that would significantly propel “Barrage” to a much wider market.

Jeff Parry, a Canadian concert promoter, and Steve Traxler, president of Chicago-based JAM Theatricals, both saw potential in the show if the production values could be brought up. “The raw product was there, but we had to give it the ‘wow’ factor,” Parry says.

Drum-and-Bugle Corps Special Led to ‘Blast!’

The spiffed-up “teaser tour,” which was launched last month in Calgary, will conclude March 29 in Washington, D.C. Then there probably will be summer festival appearances followed by an extended national tour in the fall. A production at Disney World (where “Barrage” played a six-week engagement last March) is already in the planning stages, as is another European tour. A Broadway or off-Broadway debut could happen this fall, Traxler says.

Like “Barrage,” “Blast!” had also been fermenting for a while. Its genesis could be traced back to a night in 1979 when Bill Cook, an Indiana pharmaceutical magnate, and his son watched a PBS television program about an international drum-and-bugle corps competition. Intrigued, Cook traveled around the country to catch other drum-and-bugle performances live. In 1984, he invited Jim Mason, then the leader of a Dubuque, Iowa, group to form one in Bloomington, Ind.

Mason created the Star of Indiana, which won a world championship title in 1991 over 50 other groups from North America, Europe and Japan. Three years later, 15 members of the troupe toured for two years with the Canadian Brass Orchestra, and Mason began to see the possibilities of bringing what had heretofore been outdoor stadium entertainment onto a proscenium stage.

With hefty financial backing from Cook (who has committed nearly $8 million to the effort), Mason created “Blast!,” recruiting the cast, all in their 20s and most classically trained, from among the winners of international competitions (including a snare drummer from Japan) and adding theatrical elements of lighting, sets, costumes and choreography. “We also had to vary the emotional range,” Mason says. “Two hours of a marching band on stage--that would be the equivalent of your mother screaming at you for two hours.”

Cautiously stepping into the theatrical market, Mason and Cook chose London’s West End for the world premiere of “Blast!” in December 1999, figuring that the English critics might be more accepting of the concept. Reviews were welcoming (its initial 10-week engagement was extended to six months) and PBS saw the show and decided to produce it as a television special for airing during its fund-raising drives in August 2000. As in the case of “Barrage,” that exposure helped to jump-start the successful six-month North American tour that precedes its arrival on Broadway. Meanwhile, Mason is busy casting and rehearsing two more companies of “Blast!”--one for a return engagement to London and another for a European tour. He also has been in talks with Disney about a production at one of its theme parks.

The presence of “Blast!”--and possibly “Barrage”--on Broadway underlines the elasticity of Broadway fare. Michael David, the head of the Dodgers, a theatrical production company that is acting as general managers for “Blast!,” says, “Broadway these days is a great theme park, where anything can happen.”