Showed Up: Young@Heart at St. Ann's Warehouse

by Richard Beck

The Young @ Heart Chorus is that group of old people who sing rock songs. A couple years ago somebody made a documentary about them, but it’s not very good. Instead, see their new revue, “The End of the Road,” at St. Ann’s Warehouse. They are there through Saturday. It is the #1 recommended way to see these old people sing.

The theme of the set was “nightclub,” which didn’t have much of anything to do with the actual songs. Performers “entered” and “exited” through a big, pyramidal revolving door and sometimes a chorus member would walk through the door as though to leave only to revolve all the way back onstage. I have no idea whether this was a choreographed move, genuine confusion, or just old people having fun with the fact that younger people have a hard time telling whether they’re making a joke or being really senile (exploiting this uncertainty is absolutely the part of being old that I’m most looking forward to).

The other immediately charming thing about the show was that each member of the chorus seems to have been given complete independence w/r/t costume choice. A couple of guys who had originally taken the stage in normal suits re-emerged (for no reason) in bowling shirts somewhere in the show’s middle third. One woman carried a doll around for the whole show; the two were dressed exactly alike. Another highlight was Len Fontaine, the 90-year-old who took the verses on Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life.” He wore a gray zoot suit (some of you may know this as what “pimps” wear) over a shiny orange shirt, and the feather coming out of his fedora was probably a foot and a half long. The line “It’s now or never” probably had special resonance for Leon.

Now obviously there’s an element of gimmickry to the group’s appeal, but it’s not like that appeal isn’t grounded in cultural history. Rock has been explicitly biased against the aged from the very beginning, to the extent that it’s probably our current cultural ageism’s most important and influential ancestor. I’m not saying that every rock song feels this way. That would be like saying that every single member of the Tea Party is a racist. But just as white supremacist longing is undeniably a component of that identity, so does pop music loathe and fear people who age and decay. It can’t help it.

What I’m trying to get across is that there is something more than a gimmick going on when the singers in Young @ Heart perform songs that just wish they would die already. The group was founded in a Massachusetts nursing home in 1982, and its youngest member is currently 71. Last year, the chorus lost one of its most beloved members, Fred Knittle, who had been singing since 1992. Remember, when imagining the kind of emotional impact this would have, that these people don’t exactly have a lot crowding up their schedules. In interviews, some of them are pretty open about the chorus being pretty much all they have.

In the show’s second half, a woman named Dora shuffled up to center-front. She is 88, and she looks it. She performed “As Long as I Can See the Light” by Creedence, and the way the song had been arranged had her doing about the first half verse totally unaccompanied. As the piano and bass started to come in, bit by bit, it became uncomfortably clear that she didn’t have anything close to the right pitch. I’m pretty sure she knew that something was up, because she tried to adjust a few times, but the distance between where she was and where she needed to be was two or three whole steps.

This seemed like the show’s first outright disaster, but somewhere in the instrumental bridge Dora figured things out and recalibrated. She came into the second verse right on tune, and she obviously heard that she had come in on tune because suddenly she began to actually sing. At this point, it became pretty clear that she used to have a terrific voice, or at least a very well-trained one. She was doing the diaphragm-support stuff that anybody with memories of high-school chorus will know about, but she was also pulling off a smooth transition between her chest voice and her head voice, which is more than your basic-level vocal instruction.

The point being: she totally killed the rest of the song, nailed a couple of high notes and runs, and received a nice round of applause. Then she shuffled to the back of the stage, and sat down on a bench, obviously tired, with a big white shawl over her head. I don’t think she sang a word for the rest of the show, although it looked like she spent a lot of time locking eyes with the woman who sat back there with her to make sure she was OK. They seemed to be friends.

Is the Young @ Heart chorus inspiring? I think yes, although I may be especially un-inured to the kind of Midwestern sentimentalism and humor that run through a production like “End of the Road.” It’s obviously not inspiring, in and of itself, for old people to be doing wacky stuff. Old people do that all the time, as anyone with decent grandparents knows well. But this show is a more or less serious attempt to get comfortable with what it means to know that you’re going to die soon. I have a grandfather who, after smoking for his entire life, was recently diagnosed with emphysema, as of course you would when you smoke for your entire life. The consequences are the normal ones: very restricted physical activity, no flying without an oxygen tank, etc. And in less than a year I’ve watched anger and helpless frustration largely consume the person whose bi-annual visits made me nearly insane with happiness as a kid. On Saturday, I watched the Young @ Heart people stand in rows and sing, mid-tempo, “Theologians / They don’t know nothing / About my soul;” and it was pretty clear they knew exactly what they were singing about. I remember thinking that I wish my grandfather knew the same things.

Richard Beck is from Wallingford, Pennsylvania.