New Wave Your Behaviour

Hamilton 7—John Hirsch Mainstage

I went to this show opening night on a lark, mostly because I’m firmly in the Gen X demographic the show is aimed at (although I hasten to add that I don’t think you need to have lived through that era to enjoy the show). By the midpoint it had me examining my recent life choices and thinking “sheesh, I need to quit my job” over and over – when I wasn’t laughing my arse off.

I imagine for most people, the main selling point of this excellent show will lie in the way writer/performer Tor Lukasik-Foss (hereafter TLF) perceptively and sometimes hilariously breaks New Wave artists down into four archetypes. Though he doesn’t name-check a single act, each archetype has a distinctive and instantly recognizable approach to singing, writing lyrics, and even dancing, and TLF does justice to all of them and switches between them effortlessly. (And toward the end of the show, you might realize there’s a good reason for that.) Each of these characters even gets to perform and/or be the subject of a pretty credible original song. In particular, with the first one, The Authority, TLF has Dave Gahan (of Depeche Mode) absolutely dead to rights – though of course, it’s not just Gahan, but a recurring set of tropes of which he happens to be a great example.

That said, the main thrust of the show is TLF’s struggle with dissociative episodes, documented in ways I found relatable and deeply thought-provoking. Even for viewers who don’t feel a personal stake in this aspect of the show, like me, it offers some real emotional heft, especially as you start to see how these struggles parallel the musical aspect that might, at first, seem unrelated.

This is an excellent show that a lot of people seem to be sleeping on. See it now and you get to have some bragging rights when it becomes a hit late in the festival.

Jeff Heikkinen

Editor Note: Jeff had this addendum to the review:
Interestingly, both Jen Zoratti of the Free Press and myself thought one of his New Wave archetypes – The Authority – was a dead ringer for a specific musician, but not the same one! (I named Dave Gahan while she went for Ian Curtis.) After reading her review, I find both choices about equally valid; the point of the archetypes, after all, is that they’re *not* specific musicians, but recurring sets of tropes.