By Stuart Miller . . .
At first glance, Patrick Olson may remind you of Dean Pelton from “Community”: the bald pate, the black glasses and the overly enthusiastic hand gestures and body language.
But if you close your eyes and listen to the star of Emergence—now playing at the Pershing Square Signature Center/Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre through January 7—as he muses calmly but with an underlying joy about whether we are alive:
“You see, at the molecular level you and I are composed entirely of elements like hydrogen, carbon, calcium, phosphorus, iron. There is nothing in our bodies but elements like these. That’s it. And they are all inanimate.”
The desire to teach and to make us think, combined with his mellifluous tones may call to mind Walter White when he was just a science teacher who had not yet broken bad.
But in between his contemplations about life, the universe and everything, Olson breaks into songs, joined onstage by a band, four superb background singers (who sometimes get center stage to show their stuff) and, frequently, three captivating dancers.
Olson only occasionally sounds like the Talking Heads—his rhythms are more mainstream rock, closer in style to a ‘90s band like Del Amitri or the more accessible Radiohead songs—but his movements and his memorably multi-hued suit make it clear he is striving to channel David Byrne. You may even wonder why he didn’t name the show “Start Making Sense.”
(The show’s set-up and structure is reminiscent of American Utopia and, frankly, this is the kind of thing Byrne should be writing instead of a thinly sketched, frequently maudlin story like Here Lies Love.)
Vocally, he occasionally captures the shadows of Peter Gabriel, David Bowie and (especially in the opening moments or when the videos and lighting are particularly trippy) Pink Floyd. And yet, those artists are often filled with doubt, skepticism or even despair (“Life on Mars?,” “Space Oddity”), that may provoke an existential crisis even as you relate to the singer.
By contrast, Olson’s show and his songs, even while questioning your very existence, are filled with a hopefulness that lean toward wonder and awe which, combined with well-crafted lyrics and catchy melodies, may actually call to mind the legendary children’s music star Tom Chapin.
If it seems like Olson is having a bit of an identity crisis, well, he is and he isn’t. The subtitle of the show is “Things Are Not What They Seem,” which he returns to throughout the evening as he asks “Where Are We?” and even “When Are We,” explaining that concepts like space and time may not be as straightforward as we think.
But Olson actually has a strong sense of self, steering this show—which could easily have gone awry, becoming cheesy or preachy—effortlessly; he uses charm and humor to bring clarity to overwhelming concepts with memorable examples and imagery. New Haven is about sixty miles from the theater, a distance, he notes, that is utterly unmemorable in any direction . . . unless you go up sixty miles into space, where there’s “a weightless, black, frozen vacuum. A place with no sound. No ground or sky.”
Even in the two moments in the show when Olson steps outside his role as educator to talk to us intimately about his life and how he came to be here, he subtly reminds us that things are not what they seem—he says “this isn’t part of the show” and plays those scenes as impromptu chats, yet they’re as meticulously written—and that theater is, but isn’t, real.
Ultimately, of course, science can’t really explain all the mysteries of life and even having someone as entertaining as Olson at the helm, the show lacks the emotional power and revelatory poetry of Shakespeare or August Wilson or Tennessee Williams at their best. But it’s a unique night of theater that will leave you wondering about the universe and your place in it.
Emergence – Things Are Not As They Seem. Through January 7, 2024 at the Pershing Square Signature Center/Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre (480 West 42nd Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues). www.emergenceshow.com
Photos: Russ Rowland
