Education |
SMT Study Guide |
SMT Performance |
The Story of "Forever Plaid"
When most of us think of the 1950's, we think of rock 'n' roll, greasers, hot rods, Elvis, Annette, Fabian, D.A., haircuts and teenage rebellion. But there was a flip side to this era - the side of harmony, innocence and the sincerity of dreams. It is the side that's been lost in the shuffle of progress. It was a time when most parents and kids listened and danced to the same music; when families partook of the ritual of gathering in front of the TV to watch their favorite variety shows, like the Ed Sullivan Show or the Perry Como Show. It was a time when every family worked to fulfill the American Dream.
It was a period when four-part guy groups harmonized their way across the airwaves, jukeboxes and hi-fi's of the country. Throughout the land they would stand at a quartet of microphones, crooning a multitude of chaperoned prom-goers into dreamy romance.
They wore dinner jackets and bow ties (or perhaps cardigans and white bucks). Each move was drilled to precision. Each vocal arrangement soared to stratospheric heights of harmony. This sound crested right before rock 'n' roll stole the heartbeat of music across the globe.
During this time, guys across the country banded together to sing in the basement for fun. If things worked out they might be hired to sing at weddings, conventions, proms and country club socials. Inspired by the success of the recording stars, they made plans to zoom into careers of fame and fortune. But the musical taste of the U.S.A. was changing, and the country would not stop to listen to their dreams.
This is the story of such a group - Forever Plaid!
Once upon a time, there were four guys (Sparky, Smudge, Jinx and Frankie) who loved to sing. They all met in high school, when they joined the audio-visual club (1956). Discovering they shared an affection for music and entertaining, they got together and dreamed of becoming like their idols - The Four Aces, The Four Lads, The Four Freshman, The Hi-Lo's, and The Crew Cuts. They rehearsed in the basement of Smudge's family's plumbing supply company. It was here they became Forever Plaid - a name that connects the continuation of a traditional values of family, home and harmony. Although rock 'n' roll was racing down the fast lane like a candy apple "vette", they believed in their music. As their sound developed, they sang at family gatherings, fund-raisers, and eventually graduated to supermarket openings and proms. They had little time for romance or leisure for they supported their fantasy by holding down day jobs - Frankie was in dental supplies, Smudge was in bathroom fixtures. Sparky was in better dresses. They devoted themselves to singing at nights and on weekends. Then, finally, they landed their first big gig at the Airport Hilton cocktail bar - The Fusel Lounge.
February 9, 1964 -- En route to pick up their custom-made plaid tuxedos, they were slammed broadside by a school bus filled with eager Catholic teens. The teens were on their way to witness the Beatles make their U.S. television debut on the Ed Sullivan Show and miraculously escaped uninjured. The members of Forever Plaid were killed instantly. It is at that moment, when their careers and lives ended, that the story begins.
Through the Power of Harmony and the Expanding Holes in the Ozone Layer, in conjunction with the positions of the planets and all the astrotechnical stuff, they are allowed to come back to perform the show they never got to do in life.
And having completed their Mission of Harmony, our men in plaid must return to the cosmos. Although they may be gone, through this production their dreams live on forever. (Stuart Ross, author)
Timeline
1964, when Forever Plaid is set: The President of the United States was Lyndon B. Johnson; Leonid Brezhnev became Premiere of the Soviet Union; Martin Luther King, Jr., was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; First U.S. destroyer entered a Viet Nam combat zone; Civil Rights Act was signed by President Johnson, banning racial discrimination in public places, employment, voting, education and all federally aided programs; Mini-skirts arrived in New York from London; The Beatles played Carnegie Hall and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show; Zip codes were first used by the U. S. Post Office; The top television program were, Beverly Hillbillies, Bonanza, Dick Van Dyke, and Petticoat Junction.
Popular musical groups and artists included: The Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Dusty Springfield, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Roger Miller.
SMT Performance |
Musical Style: Doo Wop!
Secular music sung by gospel-oriented African-American vocal groups was popular as early as the 1920's (Norfolk Jazz Quartet). The term "doo-wop" came to be used to identify the vocal-group sound, as the groups usually had a lead singer who was accompanied (or responded to) by other singers singing nonsense syllables or repeating a few words from the lead singer's line. The general label "doo-wop" referred to the nonsense syllable - such as "ahs" or "dum, dum, de-dums" - that the backup singers used. Two early African-American pop vocal groups whose influences could be heard in the later doo-wop style were The Mills Brothers, who sang four-part harmony in a smooth, sophisticated style, and The Ink Spots, whose high-tenor lead singer often dropped out after a chorus to allow the bass singer to speak the lyrics, accompanied by the rest of the group humming chords. They were popular in the late 1930's and early 1940's.
In the early 1950's, pioneer rock n' roll deejay Alan Freed began to feature black vocal groups on his hit radio shows. Alan Freed's program was broadcast up and down the Eastern seaboard and into Canada. As the sales of group records began to rise every record company decided they, too, wanted to produce black vocal groups. Some of the more popular groups to gain national attention were: The Orioles, The Ravens, The Cadillacs, and The Drifters. These popular rhythm n' blues vocal groups became the musical inspiration for rock n' roll, which used their unique vocal style, but went further musically and added a stronger uptempo beat that could be danced to.
The songs of black vocal groups began to be copied by white vocal groups in order to, according the record companies, appeal to a more "mainstream" audience. For example, The Crew-Cuts rerecorded The Chords hit, "Sh-Boom," and had a huge hit of their own in 1954.
But black, white, or racially integrated (such as The Dell-Vikings), doo-wop was an immensely popular musical style, which reached its peak in popularity in 1957. Groups such The Platters, The Coasters, and Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers, were enormous successes. Doo-wop lasted into the 1960's, but began to wane at about the same time as the British musical invasion in 1964 of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Animals.
America and the 1950s
Most Americans, living in a land of opportunity, have always had great hopes for the future. But high expectations, rooted in vibrant economic growth, ascended as never before in the 1950s and peaked in the 1960s, an extraordinarily turbulent decade during which faith in the wealth of the United States - and in the capacity of the federal government to promote progress - aroused unprecedented rights-consciousness on the home front.
The paradigm of the late 1950's and early 1960's was to think of the "future," and "tomorrow," and "progress," It was a time of population expansion now known as the "baby boom," stemming from post-World War II confidence in the ideal American life, the American Dream. It was personified by the art of Norman Rockwell, and the booming invasion of television into the homes of Americans, where it was reflected back to them nightly. There were "ideal" American families on T.V. in shows such as "Father Knows Best," "Leave it to Beaver," "The Donna Reed Show," "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet," "I Love Lucy," and in the early 1960's, "The Dick Van Dyke Show", which, incidentally, had the first working female on televison: the actress Rosemarie, as a television script writer.
America in the late 50s and early 60s was also a time of great expansion. The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 created the multi-lane highway system. This paved the way for a boom in automobile sales and caused the decline of train transportation. It also created new neccesities for overnight lodging (Holiday Inn, 1952), and fast-food restaurants (McDonald's, 1955).
Now that America began driving there was a rush to get away from dirty, cramped urban living and a new desire for space on the outskirsts of town, or suburbia. In the suburbs, shopping malls and supermarkets were brand new and were created with large parking lots for all those hundreds of cars.
Now the world began to get smaller, not only through the connection of television and automobile travel, but also by air travel. In 1957, the first passenger jet, the Boeing 707 began flying longer routes with less stops and with more comfortable amenities. And it was expensive! But then there were credit cards to charge the price of that flight, and the first credit card was Diner's Club in 1957. Borrowing money became the rage, and Americans began to borrow by the millions.
Computers were also beginning to be widely used in business. They were created in the late 1930s, but the 1950s saw them become smaller and more accesible, though they were still the size of an entire room.
In order to understand America in the early 1960s, we must look at the 1950s as the precursor of the next decade. In the later 1960s America shifted into a new unsettled society. Following the assasinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, there where race riots, protests over the Vietnam conflict, hippies and free love, and a drug culture that no longer hid in dark dens and alleyways, but expressed itself openly on the streets and in public parks.
However, American society in the first half of the decade was almost identical in every way to the decade preceding it.
[Four] decades later, the fifties appear to be an orderly era, one with a minimum of social dissent. Photographs from the period tend to show people who dressed carefully: men in suits, ties, and - when outdoors - hats; women with their hair in modified page-boys, pert and upbeat. Young people seemed, more than anything else, "square" and largely accepting of the given social covenants. At the beginning of the decade their music was still slow and saccharine, mirroring the generally bland popular taste. In the years following the traumatic experiences of the depression and World War II, the American Dream was to exercise personal freedom not in social and political terms, but rather in economic ones. Eager to be part of the burgeoning middle class, young men and women opted for material well-being, particularly if it came with some form of guaranteed employment. For the young, security meant finding a good white-collar job with a large, benevolent company, getting married, having children, and buying a house in the suburbs.
In that era of general good will and expanding affluence, few American doubted the essential goodness of their society. After all, it was reflected back at them not only by contemporary books and magazines, but even more powerfully and with even greater influence in the new family sitcoms on television. These, in conjunction with their sponsors' commercial goals, sought to shape their audience's aspirations. However, most Americans needed little coaching in how to live. They were optimistic about the future. It was a good time to be young and get on with family and career: Prices and inflation remained relatively low; and nearly everyone with a decent job could afford to own a home. Even if the specter of Communism lurked on the horizon - particularly as both superpowers developed nuclear weapons - Americans trusted their leaders to tell them the truth, to make sound decisions, and to keep them out of war. (David Halberstam, "The Fifties")
Slang words of the late 50s, early 60s
apple butter - smooth talk
blow your jets - to become irritated
boob tube - television
cruisin' - driving without a destination
flutter bum - a good looking boy
gas - something that is fun
grapes - girls
greaser - teenage hoodlum
hit the bottle - to bleach hair blonde
pile up on the z's - to sleep
put on your happy feet - to dance
rumble - a fight
submarine races - Lover's lane
wig chop - hair cut
Themes and topics to explore
Everyone may think a little something different about death and what happens afterwards. In Forever Plaid, the four characters are given an opportunity to come back to Earth and have their concert. Do you thinks its possible to came back to Earth?
The four "Plaids" are very serious about their singing. Even though they had jobs to sustain themselves, they considered their singing aspirations as priority. What do you consider to be your future priority, your happiness, or making lots of money? Can you have both?
Investigations
In "Forever Plaid" the music group gets to go back to earth to finish some unfinished business. Look through the TV Journal or TV listing and find a similar TV program or movie with a back-to-earth theme. After watching it, compare the two productions.
In the play, the singing group after being killed, gets to return to earth to give the performance they missed. Imagine that by accident your life has just ended and you have been given a second chance to return to earth to complete some unfinished task. Look through The News-Journal and find a worthy project. Write about why that task should be completed.
The character, Sparky, has a speech impediment, but still becomes a singing sensation. Look for stories in The News-Journal of others who have overcome handicaps to excel. Write a pretend letter telling them why you admire what he/she has accomplished.
Family rivalry such as between the stepbrothers in "Forever Plaid," can be both positive and negative. Look through copies of The News-Journal to find examples of each. Select one which you think is the most stunning and tell why you selected it.
On February 25, the 40th Annual Grammy Awards will be awarded. Use copies of The News-Journal or do a search of The News-Journal's online edition (http://www.news-journalonline.com ) to find a list of current nominees. Compare the categories with the 50s and 60s music described in this study guide. Which ones are the same? Tell why you think that style of music is still popular.
A section of this study guide lists some slang expressions commonly used in the late 50s and 60s. Look through The News-Journal for examples from that list or their current slang equivalents. Which ones do you think will be around 30 years from now? Why? Why not?
Some of the TV shows popular in the 50s are still being shown on TV. Look through the TV Journal or TV listings and find at least two to watch. Compare life then with life in the 90s. Has the American Dream changed? What things are the same? Different?
Especially for students...
In live theatre, unlike movies and television, the actors can hear (and often see) you as easily as you can hear and see them. If you comment out loud at a live show, or read or eat, you disturb not only other members of the audience but also the people on stage, thus diminishing the performance and, ultimately, your enjoyment of it.
This doesn't mean you have to remain silent. Actors want you to respond with laughter and applause; but such responses should always be genuine and appropriate to the moment. Such inconsiderate behavior as shouting, catcalling or sustained whispering, even during blackouts, can ruin the concentration of actors and audience members alike. And throwing paper or objects of any kind towards the stage is not only rude, it's also extremely dangerous to the performers.
In the event of any student misbehavior, the relevant school will be contacted and its principal informed.
We want you to enjoy your visit to Seaside Music Theater, and we rely on you to exercise your common sense and mature judgment. Thank you for being a valuable part of our audience this season.