5 O’clock Bells, the story of Lenny Breau. a monologue that outweighs time and remains brilliantly intact!
5 O’clock Bells, written and performed by Pierre Brault brings the artist back to the Gladstone theatre 12 years later in a show that has retained all its impeccable artistry since its world première in 2008, in the same theatre. Commissioned by the Great Canadian Theatre Company (gctc) in 2006. This powerful portrait of Canadian Jazz Guitarist Lenny Breau who grew up in Maine, with a family of country musicians but whose exceptional musical and guitar-playing talents lead him to search out new forms of contemporary music, spear- headed cotemporary jazz in other parts of the continent, influenced especially by the work of Chet Atkins,who lead him to create a sound that brought him world recognition as a brilliant and original guitarist.
However, this show also confirms the international level of Pierre Brault’s talents as a respected solo performer who is able to capture and incarnate with rapid and incisive strokes of the voice and the body a whole microcosm of Breau’s world from his intimate family to his professional mentors and musical influences who played important roles in his musical evolution. The context is clearly brought into perspective on a near empty stage, as the space is enhanced by sound and light: the choices of recording clips of Breau’s hypnotically smooth musical style and David Magladry’ss sculptural lighting design that sets the actor on the strings of a guitar stretching from downstage to upstage as the spaces light up when the body of the actor, as the musician, fingers the strings that create all the hypnotic magic on his instrument. The result is a most smooth, seamless, flowing sound that confirmed the special quality of Breau’s touch, and the enormous strength of the portraits of a whole microcosm of individuals who inhabited this man’s world, giving life to every moment of his existence as a man, as an actor and as a musician.
This time, after so many years, the result is a breathtaking performance that equates the actors physical performance with the delicately flowing guitar sounds, the corporeal gestures which highlight the sound and the choreography of the event, carry the performance forward without a rough moment, without a disjointed sound just as the music flows forward. The actor and the music fuse together in a similar feeling of perfection. It was uncanny!
The musician’s trajectory was in fact narrated by the different voices telling the Breau story at various points in his life . The kindly, concerned higher pitched voice of his French Canadian mother, dominated his youth, while the father grew rougher and unpredictable , even jealous as the talent of his young son overshadowed the father. It became a thorn in that family performance as the family musical group sled towards a breakdown in their relationship. Brault transformed himself suddenly into a bitter father who drank too much, whose affairs disturbed the mother. The mother became an unhappy but talented woman who recounted those disturbing discoveries of women in her husbands life just as Lenny, growning more and more popular through his radio appearances attracted new musical mentors and adoring women. His travelling on the road, from USA to Tornto, to Los angeles and New York, as all the big music producers sought to audition Lenny and the actor flowed through those multiple voices making each one distinctive enough to avoid any confusion in the mind of the audience. His many relationships with women became sorry dramas as Lenny showed he was not interested in playing to make money to support his family but wanted especially to create new music as he drove himself forward in a race against death. In New York he came into contact with soft drugs , then hard drugs and there is an extremely difficult moment where the author describes his first encounter with heroin as a deeply poetic experience that turns his life into a nightmare when he believes he has plunged into a new sense of reality that would allow him to produce wondrous new music.
The structure of the play comes full circle as it moves to the beginning when Lenny is again on the phone with his mother saying he is trying to come home to Main but but cant make it because he is not well..and she warns him to leave that woman who has become so dangerous..a certain Jewel linked to strong religious beliefs, trust in God and her desire to keep her claws in him so that he will protect her. She has caught him with the drugs that he cannot escape.
As he sinks into drug induced comas which change his whole being, stumbling around in the loud blinking lights of the New York set that confuse him, he turns in circles, seeks everywhere and is incapable of finding his musical way. The result is tragic and incomprehensible.
The music was admirable but his personal life was destroyed and Lenny Breau never came home in spite of his mothers voice over the phone begging him to return. That was the most poignant of all….
A most powerful representation of a life that operated on many levels showing how this actor has the unlimited capacity and enormous gift of adapting himself to any kind of performance.
Written and performed by Pierre Brault, February 11 -22. The Gladstone theatre.
Directed by Bian Quirt
Set and costumes by Brian Smith
Lighting design by Martin Conboy
Guitarist and musical Consultant Paul Bourdeau
Produced by Judi Pearl.