Fix Your Vision with This One Weird Trick: Olympia punk band nightmayor debut their biggest and perhaps craziest musical yet, The Oculist.
The two-person punk band nightmayor are well outside the standard profile of musical creators. To begin with, neither Percy Boyle nor Stella R.S. are theatre kids — well, “I was an orchestra kid actually,” R.S. admits. Boyle’s influence came less from his own experience as a performer, and more as an enthusiastic consumer of the genre when he was a kid.
Instead, they sort of backed into musicals. “We’d always done shows in costume,” recalls Boyle, “and we started to incorporate stories around songs we’d already written. We found the more story we put in, the more audiences responded.”
This led to their first bona fide musical, the 20-minute, one-act The Frog Scientist, concerning an evil scientist who’s experimenting with, you guessed it, frogs. “We just kept expanding our ideas,” says Boyle, so this show led to others, a hybrid of wrestling and musical performance (The Angel Cult), a touring musical comedy dance show (Adopted Brothers: Not Related By Blood) and most recently The Total Package, a dating show satire.
So what led to their newest production, The Oculist, an irreverent retelling of the true story of John Taylor, an itinerant eye surgeon who traveled through Europe in the 18th century?
“I read Wiki pages a lot,” says Boyle, “and sometimes I just hit the random button and cycle through. It was in an article about Handel, I think, about how he’d had eye surgery from the same man who also had treated Bach. And as I read about this, I thought about how this one obscure oculist had such a massive impact on history.
“I read everything I could, really,” Boyle continues. “There’s some interest in him in the history of medicine and eye surgery because he was right about a lot of things, but he was also way over-confident, and didn’t have a sense of morality.” He also read about the world around John Taylor, and the more he read, the more fascinated he became in the historical reality of Europe at the time.
“But the story we ended up with is much more absurd and cartoonish,” inserts R.S., and Boyle laughs.
“Yeah. I did as much research as I could before we went off the rails,” he says. “There’s so much there. But we knew we weren’t interested in a realistic retelling. As a straight-up play, it would be too sad. But there’s something about musicals where you can really push the absurdity while also having beautiful moments. Music allows people to emote in all directions, to be bigger and three dimensional.”
Many musical creators in the past couple of decades have created musicals with unconventional subject matter and approach — in fact, since The Book of Mormon and Urinetown, it’s a well-trod path to financial success. But nightmayor inspirations have been more from bands and movies they like, like the irreverent film The Favourite, about the court of Queen Anne, and the 2003 crime drama Party Monster. “Amadeus was big too,” adds R.S., “the way it’s a period piece set in the 18th century that’s also so alive and fun and absurd, not stilted, not about historic accuracy. It’s not about getting a history lesson, it’s about trends and relationships that show up throughout time.”
It’s these eternal aspects that the pair believe make the show so relevant. “A lot of what we’re dealing with today is not as far away from the snake oil atmosphere that this story is set in,” says R.S. “Every day on your phone you’ll see all these insane health fixes that people claim are cure-alls. And the health system we have makes it difficult for people to get what they need, and so they’re always looking for stuff that makes them feel better in the short term. Try this one weird trick, and then everything will be better forever.”
Musicals are big, elaborate production machines — even ones performed by a dozen people on the backstage of Wild Child (formerly Wildman Gastropub). Here the duo’s punk aesthetic pays off, as it isn’t just about the music, but also DIY costumes and props, all hand-made or rescued from dumpsters. “My definition of punk is more a spirit, a mode of doing things,” adds R.S. “That’s our mode. All the dances are choreographed by us, everything’s homemade. Our cast is almost completely local artists, and people who aren’t theatrical performers. I think we both enjoy art that is outsider art, that comes from that mindset.”
“Olympia is special,” says Boyle, “and there are huge benefits to doing it here. This is all about people we know personally and relationships we’ve built. We’ve been performing on that stage forever, and they love us, and are letting us rehearse there twice a week.” Many of their cast were met at Elizabeth Lord’s annual Vaudeville Show, performed on the same stage. “If you’re willing to just do things with your friends, outside of the institutional theaters, so many people step up to help.”
Still, it’s a tremendous amount of work for not a lot of money (they’re still working to raise funds via Kickstarter). What are they hoping for this anachronistic and absurd look at quackery and fraud, in a fraught political period where so little can be known about the future? “We want people to laugh, to cry, to laugh in the face of evil, and to shrink it down,” says R.S. “To feel that the sick and evil world around you isn’t so scary, that it’s more dumb and pathetic, and that you can handle it.”
Photos by Percy Boyle.
WHAT:
The Oculist
WHEN:
November 14, 15, 21, 21, 23, 24 at 7 p.m., doors open at 6:30 p.m.
WHERE:
Wild Child, 414 4th Ave E, Olympia
COST:
$20
LEARN MORE:
https://nightmayor.online/theoculist