Matt Johnson & The New Jet Set will perform their jazz versions of many classic Disney songs at the Sierra Madre Playhouse beginning Friday, March 22nd and continuing through Sunday, March 24th. Johnson has created a multi-media show that includes stories, anecdotes from his many years as being a Cast Member at Disneyland and many of the classic songs we all know and love.

Last week I spoke with Johnson (who drums for multiple artists including Jane Lynch) about his lengthy relationship with all things Disney and the songwriters and songs that make us all light up when we hear them. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview with Johnson, please go to our YouTube channel (where you can also see an interview with Alan Menken).

Q: Duke Ellington famously sings in one of his compositions, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” What does the Disney songbook mean with and without swing? [The lyrics were by Irving Mills]

Listen, the Disney songbook doesn’t need my interpretation to stand alone in the annals of memorable music. We just happen to interpret it in our chosen vehicle. We take those memorable melodies and just put them in the jazz machine and crank them up and what comes out is usually very swinging. A lot of the music lends itself to swing. There’s lots of lullabies and happy children’s songs and some marches and some of them naturally lend themselves to swing. Then others we choose to have a little more fun with them. In one instance the beautiful ballad A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes from Cinderella. We’ll do it as a samba and play almost a double time rhythm underneath it. So sometimes the swing just happens. And other times we consciously choose to put it in a style that makes us even more happy.

Some of those films had great opportunities for swing. They did have Louis Prima as a voice in The Jungle Book, and they had Peggy Lee write songs and perform them for Lady and the Tramp. But those were exceptions. Do you think that there was a conscious decision in the history of Disney songs not to go into a swing mode? Or do you think that the films didn’t necessarily lend themselves to that style?

I know from being a long time Disney cast member that story is the most important thing. So whoever was in charge whenever a production was in the making, they thought about what would be the best way to convey the story. So conscious decision – definitely. But just crowbar in swing music? No.

By the time you get to Toy Story with someone like Randy Newman, you have a composer who has jazz in his bloodstream.

He does. You’ve Got a Friend in Me has very much a swingy bounce to it. I think it’s definitely a conscious decision to play jazz and or any other style. I’m thinking now Ratatouille – all Parisian. Michael Giacchino’s orchestration with lots of accordion and clarinet. Very Parisian, almost a gypsy jazz appropriate for the setting in the story it tells.

How do you see the Disney songbook having evolved over the years? What do you like most about the way it was, and what do you like most about the way it is today? 

I have had the wonderful experience of seeing it in the audience’s faces as we’ve performed the show a few times now. You can’t separate the music from the time when you experienced it in the movie theater. For those of us of a certain age, that means a really grand occasion. Back before you could stream a movie on your watch, it was a really big deal to go to a theater. We always looked forward to the Disney movies. Growing up in Southern California we had the opportunity to go to Disneyland. So we saw all the the tie-ins with the attractions and all the visuals. And, of course, we saw the characters. We also had the Wonderful World of Color and the Wonderful World of Disney. The music is just one of many, many emotional touchstones that are layered in us.

If there was any one team of composers or songwriters for whom the Disney catalog is best represented, it’s going to be the Sherman Brothers: Richard and Robert Sherman. What do you think makes their songs more beloved, or given them the ability to stand the test of time above perhaps any other songwriter’s songs who have appeared in Disney movies? 

First of all, we have to agree to the premise of your question are they, in fact, the greatest? And I think the reason both of us initially say yes, without a doubt, is because of the volume of work that they did when the studio was young or in their heyday. There was a period of time when Disney wasn’t making great movies, but everything before 1975 rocked. Maybe even earlier than that. Aristocats came out in 1970 and certainly everything that preceded it was just fantastic.

Walt referred to them as the boys. He’d storyboard with some of his artists and he said, let me get the boys in here, and then we’ll figure out where we’re going from here. The stories that I know, and even the documentary footage that I’ve seen, there was such a collaboration [with] the brothers. To see one at the piano and the other one scratching down something and changing and getting stuck on a word and seeing that collaboration was personally very inspiring. 

Doesn’t it feel like Alan Menken is the heir to what the Sherman Brothers were able to accomplish?

In and through the collaboration with his lyricists…Yes. All of those contemporary things from Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid. I’m no different than most. I’m really affected emotionally performing this music and having the responsibility of giving a little insight through my narration. Instead of saying, “Now we’re going to play I Just Can’t Wait to Be King,” I give a little background on the music and the production or something that I’ve read that’s interesting that maybe we don’t know. I have to be careful that I don’t trigger an emotional little thing in me that becomes distracting or, even worse, makes me emotional. 

Don’t you feel like this music allows us to revisit our childhood in some way, shape or form?

Every single time. My friend Charles Phoenix put it so perfectly, “Every time I go there, I feel all the ages I’ve ever been.” Because he remembers encountering the Disney magic at all these different points in his life. And also remembering the people in your life that are no longer with us. When you think about going there with your grandparents, I mean, that’s a powerful memory, you know? It’s just part of who I am. 

You can’t walk through the park without hearing music everywhere. A lot of it’s piped in now, but walk Main Street. You know better than anyone, that’s where you often hear live music.

Right. Straw Hatters are still out there. From season to season, sometimes they bring back a couple of what we call the break down groups: The Firehouse Hook and Ladder Gang. It’s been a while. The sax quintet who dressed in that Keystone Cops? We say Keystone Cops, but, the police uniforms from the previous century. The pre-recorded music there is all early, sort of parlor music. It’s not exactly ragtime yet. It predates ragtime. It’s happy family music from the turn of the century.

A lot of the music that that you and I know and that people probably have at least half a generation below us embrace as well, is stuff that kids today don’t necessarily have any relationship to unless their parents held on to old DVDs or they would catch the films on Disney Plus. What do you see in in terms of young people who come to these concerts and their response to these songs that they didn’t grow up with the same way you and I did?

There’s one thing that happens in general. I’m reminded of my friend Tony Guerrero, who says, “Even if you don’t think you’re familiar with jazz, if you witness a live performance, you can’t help but like it.” There’s just something about live musical performance that’s very powerful. Something you and I would take for granted because we sat through innumerable concerts, but young people wouldn’t necessarily. We try to have a couple of the contemporary Disney songs in there.

My indoctrination into the world of Disney took place when my aunt took me at three years old to go see Mary Poppins. That was the first time I became aware of movies. It was the first time I became aware of musicals in any way, shape or form. Obviously, the first time that I became aware of Disney in any in any measurable way. It is my understanding that you have worked with Dame Julie Andrews.

I was performing with a group called the Palm Springs Yacht Club in the early 90s. It was a musical comedy group, but we worked for maybe 3 or 4 years as a warm-up act for a handful of touring celebrities at the time, including Julie Andrews, but also the Smothers Brothers and comedian Rich Little.

We traveled one whole summer with Julie Andrews. It was my personal experience that she was wonderful and had a wonderful sense of humor. She was appreciative of the small supporting role that we played in her show. She traveled with an ensemble as well. We were traveling separately. Her band was on a standard tour bus at the time. She drove in a limousine and had a driver. This was the caravan. It wasn’t uncommon that the band, while on the road, their wives would come out sometimes and join the tour for the weekend and fly home. I overheard a conversation where she offered one of the guys the limo so he and his wife could travel from one venue to the next together to have some time together. She road on the bus. That said a lot about who she was. She was always very, very good humored and always made us feel as though our role was valued.

In Richard Sherman’s book, Pursuing Happiness, he tells a story about giving a lecture at USC. As he described it, some smartalec shouted out, “How much money did you make from Winnie the Pooh?” He goes on to tell this story about a girl in Texas who had fallen down a well. As they were trying to rescue her the girl apparently told her mother that she wanted her to sing Winnie the Pooh, because “Winnie the Pooh was in great tightness and he got out and I’m going to get out.” Richard Sherman said, “That moment made me the richest man in the world.” How does music in general, and these Disney songs in particular, make you the richest man in the world?

We just performed our show a couple nights ago. After the show a gentleman came up to me and said, “My dad has Alzheimer’s.” Out of the blue. I never met this guy before. I said I’m very sorry, not knowing where he was going with this. And he said, “He’s been living with us. When I was leaving the house, I said, I’m going to see a Disney show tonight. They’re playing Disney music.” His father, with Alzheimer’s, brightened up and said, “Do you remember when we took you to see The Aristocats?” Now, The Aristocats is not one of the most memorable movies, but it’s a fabulous movie released in 1970, and it happened to be the very last animated feature that Walt Disney would be able to approve for production in 1965. 

He went on to say that his little brother was born and stayed in the ICU for six weeks. [He continued] “When my little brother was able to finally come home my dad took my sister and I out to see The Aristocats.” This person who was suffering from Alzheimer’s was able to tap into that because of his connection to the Disney music. You can’t put a price on that; that I was part of a performance that reminded both those individuals of that story and that he chose to relate it to me.

Knowing how it affects people, how deeply connected people are to this music, it’s a great responsibility. Whether I’m playing at the park or whether I’m playing on the outside with my own band and present this music at the highest level, because I know how people relate to it. It is a gift that I cherish and I don’t take it for granted.

To watch the full interview with Matt Johnson, please go here.

Main Photo: Matt Johnson (Courtesy Matt Johnson)

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Frank Farian was the mastermind behind 1970’s group Boney M and the disgraced Grammy Award-winning duo Milli Vanilli. Walt Disney was head of his namesake studio that turned Joel Chandler Harris’ Tales of Uncle Remus into the film Song of the South (1946). Only in the inventive mind of artist/writer/director Edgar Arceneaux would these disparate stories find their way into a story about a matriarch battling dementia and how it impacts her two sons.

That’s the premise of Boney Manilli, which has its world premiere on October 5th at REDCAT in Los Angeles as part of CAP UCLA‘s 2023-2024 season. Boney Manilli runs through October 7th.

Arceneaux may be best known for his drawings, sculpture and installations. This very personal show of his, inspired by his late mother’s own battle with dementia, has been in the works for six years. Boney Manilli has burrowed into his psyche and in the process he’s found a way to examine our present-day world while finding a personal catharsis.

I recently spoke with Arceneuax about the combination of these stories, his own experiences with his mother and what it took for him to get all the pieces in place for Boney Manilli to work. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview with Arceneaux, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: Edgar Arceneaux, you told Caroline Goldstein for Artnet in 2020 that “The power of what art is, which is distinctive from other fields, is its unruliness, its nature to ask new questions.” Is that the guiding principle for you when you embark on any project? And if so, what was the principal question you wanted to ask with Boney Minilli? 

Because its nature is to be interpreted, it means that each person’s individual perspective is important. That it’s in that space of differences, in that space of debate, where power comes from. Which is different than, say, an advertisement or maybe even an illustration which is meant to be instrumentalized. But I think that art’s power comes amidst its unwillingness to be fully turned into one meaning or one message.

In the case of Boney, confusion is part of that unruliness, and it’s confusion on two different sides. On one side is a writer/director that I named after myself, Edgar, who is struggling to write a play about Milli Vanilli. Every time he thinks he has it, then it slips away. At the same time he’s trying to take care of his mother, who is slowly dying from dementia and is forgetting everything.

There’s a brother in the middle of the story whose name is Bro Bro, and he’s the younger brother. He’s also trying to tell a story. But this one is centered around the Song of the South, the story that Walt Disney Studios made into a film. He’s convinced, and everyone else in the family is convinced, that that movie was actually written by their grandfather and that Disney stole it from them. So all of them are trying to tell the story before the mother passes away.

How often do you find ideas or projects that you’re doing slipping away from you? If you’re going to name the character after yourself, how much of you is in this? 

Quite a bit. But there’s two different aspects of the character. There’s the one that’s struggling with the story and the frustration that comes along with that. But he’s struggling with the economic insecurity where he hopes that this thing is going to be able to get him out of the hole that he’s in. He’s living with his mother again.

Then there’s also the kind of madness that happens to people that can happen to you when you’re taking care of a loved one who’s going through either dementia or Alzheimer’s, because they go from being the person who’s there to nurture you to you becoming the person that nurtures them.

My mother and I had an amazing relationship up until the day that she passed. I did recognize in myself the capacity to become a really terrible person because of the emotional weight and responsibility. It just really tears and breaks everything apart when the mom is dealing with an illness.

In a podcast that UCLA Arts did with you a year ago when Boney Manilli was a work-in-progress, you talked about how these characters go through a baptism of fire. Have you been through a catharsis during the process of creating and bringing this show to life?

Most certainly. This is actually the fourth expression of this project over the last six years. This is the first one where I felt like I really could use the the aspects of how dementia impacts your mind as a kind of organizing principle for how to tell the story. When we did it as a work-in-progress presentation last March, it was impossible for me to really tell the story from that perspective because my mom had just passed away a year before. To go in three years after her passing, that can be a little more objective and a little more settled. The absolute reality, the undeniable reality, that she’s no longer physically here has given me a bit of creative distance to be able to really dig in to it in a way in which I just couldn’t do before.

I had this beautiful moment last night because I was with my dad. I had just taken him out to dinner and we were sitting on the bed. I finished a final edit of the script and I sent it to all the management team and the designers. I realized I was sitting on my mom’s side of the bed when I sent that final email off. It felt, in a subtle way, that there was something about it that was very poetic and I couldn’t have timed it that way.

Boney Manilli combines two problematic components of popular culture: Milli Vanilli and Song of the South, both of which have their own baggage that accompany them. What was the impetus for combining these two into one story?

I started to think about the relationship between these two stories: the one about the the potential death and then the way in which Joel Chandler Harris, the person who’s credited with these stories – actually just collected them from people who lived either on his plantation and of his grandfather or other Blacks who had these oral traditions – and then he created this character called Uncle Remus essentially in the same way that Rob and Fab existed as these fictional placeholders for a white author’s voice.

I recognized that these two stories are coming together, but I couldn’t leave those two things together without recognizing that there was a third element which was produced by juxtaposing these two things. Which is the way in which there is an industry of entertainment that values and monetizes this kind of trauma. The show is very critical of our desire to learn about the stories of people who’ve been taken advantage of.

And Frank Farian and Walt Disney both did that.

They did. But the lens of this show is very much focused on the appetite of the audience for these kinds of stories. So when you come and see it, you’ll see how we try to turn the camera from the stage to the audience. And it’s funny to me in some interesting ways.

CAP UCLA says, in laying out information about this show, “To paint the picture of identity and infamy within its true reality is Arceneaux’s artistry at its best.” We’re living in a time when identity is being discussed far more openly and with perhaps greater acceptance than it has in quite some time. But it’s going hand-in-hand with a culture via social media that allows us to manufacture our identity – which doesn’t necessarily have any basis in reality. What do you see as the present day reality of how we are looking at identity? 

The question of how we see ourselves, how we label ourselves, goes hand-in-hand with with lens-based technologies that force us to quantify where we begin and where another person ends. I think the more pluralistic understanding of race, class, identity is really good for us as a republic. I do think that is butting up against the edges of grand monopolies and grand pooling of resources, both politically and economically, which is fortifying itself against this this desire for more of a plateau as opposed to giant pyramids of power. These things are pushing against each other. These monopolies are ways of reinforcing heteronormative ideas about ourselves.

Many artists are most excited about doing something that scares them. Was doing something like this show something that scared you?

A reason why I’ve been working on this project for six years is because the first three iterations were not great. I was sweating. It’s the worst feeling in the world to have an audience watching something of yours and you know that it’s not right. You’re just cringing on the inside because putting on these shows is so expensive. You’ve raised this money from other people [and] you want to do the best that you can. Sometimes you’re just not there and you just have to keep working at it. You have to keep faith that you’re going to get there. But there’s no indication that for certain you will.

Then at a certain point I was just like, Oh, I see the story now. I never could find the ending. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t write it for five years. And then I did. 

After your mother’s funeral, you quoted her on social media. You said she said to you, “Just because my body ain’t here don’t mean I’m not still with you. I will always be two steps behind you, just right there when you need me.” How is your mother there with you through the creation and the rehearsals for Boney Manilli? 

Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, that example of sitting on the bed with her last night is one example. She was a person who had an unyielding faith in me and my siblings. Oftentimes I would hear her voice or I can feel, some inkling that I was doing right by her in the story. After she passed I could feel her energy all around me, in me and the natural environment around me. I would often just rely upon that belief to stay grounded and keep the faith that this was going to be a great show.

To see the full interview with Edgar Arceneaux, please go here.

Main Photo: Two cast members of Boney Manilli with Edgar Arceneaux (Photo by Richard Ffrench/Courtesy CAP UCLA)

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To be fair, there is a logic here. Snow White was apparently Turing’s favorite film. So the pairing here, while provocative, has a basis in reality. What’s exciting about this piece is to see how this LA-based dance company, lead by Founding Artistic Director Laura Karlin, plans to combine these two stories.

As this teaser for Formulae & Fairy Tales indicates, sometimes an apple isn’t just an apple. Or is it?

In a press release for these performances, Karlin says, ““This show is many things. It is a whimsical leap into a vivid imagination. It is a love letter to a great mind. It is a playground and a memory and a machine. It is a rejection of tragedy in favor of hope, redemption, and an implacable desire that our world be better for the people living in it.”

Invertigo Dance Theatre was created in 2007. They will be touring Formulae & Fairy Tales during the 2020-2021 season. This weekend we get to be the first to see it!

For tickets on Friday night go here.

For tickets on Saturday night go here.

Photo by George Simian/Courtesy of The Broad Stage

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