"Sin" Scene 13

Christopher R. Smith and Saudia Yasmein

“Kiss Me”  Santana comes across the distraught Devlin.  He’s just prevented Faith from committing the ultimate sin of suicide which would have sealed her fate and freed him; because he intervened Faith is still alive and able to make a choice about what direction she wants to go, so she hasn’t officially been “corrupted” completely yet.  Santana reminds Devlin he’s still under contract and has apparently failed his task.  She invites him to enjoy one last kiss with her before she takes him to hell to be come one of her legion.  She shows him he’s still under her power by making him bow down and giving him a peck on the cheek.  She leaves him to his thoughts.  Everything is still going exactly the way she planned, including this moment of reminding Devlin she still “owns” him. 

This was one of my favorite moments in the show, it really captured the more serious tone I was hoping to achieve.  The scene has a parallel to “Give Me What I Want,” the earlier song where Santana seduces Devlin, only this time Devlin is more prone to resist (even though he can’t).  Musically both songs are similar too—they both have a cool, jazzy, seductive, “hip-hop-light” feel that I thought was kind of fresh and more mature really, and there’s an undercurrent of tension that’s hard to describe.  They’re also just songs I really enjoyed playing.  I got a lot of comments about them after each performance too—they were certainly different for musical theatre, and embraced by people who don’t usually go for musical theatre productions. 

Musically of course the song is a hat-tip to “J’taime Moi Non Plus,” the Gainsborough hit.  I remember hearing an instrumental version of it as a kid in the 70s and really being transported…it’s like the chords themselves are somehow seductive, with or without the words.  I added a little bit of “Psyche Rock,” an early synth song by Pierre Henry that found new life in the 90s when it got remixed a lot (which is when I first heard it)—that’s where the chimes come from anyway.  I also introduced something that would come back again soon, some hard electric guitar.  I didn’t ever think of “Sin” as a “rock” opera, I called it a “pop” opera, considering the simplistic, synth-based nature of most of the songs.  But this one does get pretty grungy in the middle.  Oh, and that’s me singing the harmonies at the end—so buried in the mix you hopefully can barely even tell it’s a voice at all (I never aspired to be a singer but I wanted those harmonies and no one else was around to do them).  Once again, I think I was inspired by “Come Go With Me” by the Del-Vikings, for some unknown reason, giving this song a weird “1960s” vibe on top of everything else. 

Anyway, this is another one I think works well as an instrumental, I put it out into the world quite a few times under different names over the years but this might be my favorite, I made an actual music video out of it (with found footage and After Effects) and I’ve gotten great feedback on it: https://youtu.be/OUrvdNz3bl0?si=GESax_fcCHeKlCBX

Lyrically "Kiss Me" is really just exposition.  There’s a pop motif of Santana repeating “kiss me” but other than that the lyrics are very talky (I don’t dare use the word “rap,” something I have no expertise in whatsoever, I’ll leave that to the pros).  This is—again—an echo of Devlin and Santana’s first encounter, where she keeps repeating her line and he goes on and on protesting nervously.  I really like things in “twos and fours”-- there are parallels like that all over "Sin," 2 dancers, a male/female lead where the girl is “good” and the guy is “bad,” another couple where the guy is good and the woman is bad.  I specifically added a third dancer to “Ruby,” my next show, and tried to incorporate patterns of “3” there.  Is this a mild form of OCD?  Probably but I just find it amusing ultimately.    

If you listen to the original demo version you can hear the song done as “straight” as possible, with all the lyrics sharply recorded and sitting above the mix, so you can hear the endless words coming.  Chris Maikish did an excellent job as usual and once again lent his soaring, angelic voice, giving it a lot of power. Tricia Ridgway, as “Santana,” brought an interesting aura of vulnerability to the character, her voice is so sweet and lilting.  Here’s the demo version from 2010:   https://youtu.be/VW6DCJCES0o

When we did the 2011 version I was thankful to get the mega-talented Terri Olsen, a musical theatre veteran with an endless list of credits, as “Santana” and she was just amazing, a professional from beginning to end.  She played the character as very sexy but more mature; a pillar of icy strength—and often bringing in a lilting, surprising sense of sweet humor.  A fair-skinned blonde, she had a lot of fun trying out the costume I’d chosen for the character.  I was unaware of it at the time, but the night we did the sing-thru apparently she was really sick with a cold or hayfever or something, and, from what I heard later, just miserable, to the point she was considering canceling—still, the show had to go on and she did a wonderful job, and I have thanked her profusely since…I just remember noticing she wasn’t wearing the bowler hat on top of her black page-boy wig as the show started and wasn’t sure why, she was (to coin a phrase) in hell that night, really uncomfortable, and I'm sorry for that.  Oh, and Kay was the one who thought up the idea of giving her a riding crop used earlier—Kay always came up with the most interesting ideas (my original idea was a cigarette stiletto).  And Joe Sousa, once again, just knocked the walls of Skinny's Bar down with his incredible voice, power and sense of innate compassion—the audience was completely invested in his well-being by this point in the show, you could feel it:  https://youtu.be/uywPDZdQ2wI

The version from 2015 really is the vision I had for the scene, maybe the whole show, except, I guess, for the fact that we only had a tiny stage and the projected images looked pretty cheap and tacky. 

The “Three Clubs,” in the middle of a pretty trashy part of Hollywood, is a tough, grungy, defiantly old-school dive bar that is bathed in a lurid scheme of red and black colors, and it’s pretty weathered and lived-in so it was perfect for the kind of edgy, semi-sleazy vibe I was after. 

Chris Smith did a perfect job of really conveying his angst and conflict as he grapples with the choice of whether to be a “good guy,” or give into his inevitable fate as he has all his life.  He did curse me a few times for forcing him to sing lower than his register a few times, as I recall, but he was always a professional and worked incredibly hard to get the mouthful of lyrics I gave him out.

Saudia, as usual, owned the show and everyone in the audience with her voice and acting.  She also brought things to the character, and this scene, that I could never have written; I told her to make it her own, and she did, and no one I have worked with since has matched her power and passion.  She rides the perfect line between being completely in control-unto-intimidating and also being seductive, soft and sexy,. Underneath it all she’s still a proper business person who is more concerned about the “deal,” her business, then anything else. 

Lastly, Kirby and Natalie did such a wonderful job of playing the ineffectual “Greek chorus” who often side with Santana, acting as her minions, but just as often play neutral devils/angels assisting with the progress of the story.  Here, for their last scene in the show, I envisioned a kind of seductive pas de deux for the two of them (along with their signature sway-back-and-forth move they did the whole show).  At the end of the song they basically waltz each other off the stage and aren’t seen again…we simply ran out of time to choreograph more; I’d already given them a ton to do, appearing in virtually every scene and requiring them to do a lot of helpful "business" to keep the show going (prop entrances and removals among other things).  So, the song ends up being bittersweet in many ways, the first of the “endings” that are on the way as the show heads towards its conclusion--which was exactly what I wanted for it, even as I would have loved to have had the time to do a lot more actual dancing in the piece. 

A note:  I haven’t mentioned yet that another inspiration for “Sin” was a long-forgotten (and rightfully so I suppose) TV special from 1976, “Mary’s Incredible Dream,” noteworthy by anyone who knows about it for being one of the most terrible hours that ever aired on TV, and a huge misstep for the beloved Ms. Tyler-Moore.

I saw the special first run as a kid and my jaw was on the floor the whole running time…not only was it “sung-through,” composed entirely of pop songs with no dialog, which was a weird enough novelty--it was also (sort of) about a war between the traditional powers of good and evil, casting Ben Vereen and, inexplicably, Mary Tyler Moore—fresh from the wholesome character everyone saw on her sitcom each week—as “angels and devils.” 

Further, it was just weird.  Long before I discovered and fell in love with Ken Russell I saw this TV show, which was surely influenced by the oeuvre of Russell (and Fosse too).  It was as much a surreal nightmare as it was the titular “dream” and I memorized every frame of it as a kid.  That was a good thing, as it was never shown again and still remains hard to find.  I got a copy of it in the 2000s and was astounded how well I remembered it, and how it still—despite being ill-conceived, confused, messy and tacky—spoke to me.  There’s no question I was inspired by it to create my own sung-through pop music passion play…perhaps I hoped to live up to it, or even live down to it.  I should be so lucky as to even be compared to it.