The show’s premise was the invention of its director, Daniel Fish, though a footnote in the leaflet reads “Based on a previous concept by Andrew Lieberman and Amy Rubin,” allowing us to wonder whose idea it actually was. In any case, it was Fish, in collaboration with musical arrangers Daniel Kluger and Nathan Koci and choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zolar, who gave the concept its theatrical and musical form. Fish has been directing for about a quarter-century, usually well out of the mainstream currents, but has recently become a bankable showbiz commodity owing to his snorkeling through the darkest underwater caverns of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, for which he took home a Tony. (And it’s remarkable how quickly and passively the more fashionable revisionist tropes are absorbed: Laura Collins-Hughes’ NYT review referred to “the American culture of gun violence that’s at the core of that show.” No, it isn’t, unless someone puts it there—which should never be a director’s prerogative.) The bafflement that many expressed over Most Happy in Concert is somewhat eased by consideration of Fish’s background in the avant-identifying portion of our theatrical garde, most particularly the four years he spent working at the Berliner Volksbühne under its longtime director, Frank Castorf. Granted, that’s only an influence, but at that duration clearly a major one. To the extent that it define’s Fish’s work, it places him in the neo-avant-garde realm of “postdramatic” theatre. The term covers a range of concepts and working techniques, but among the ones shared across this field of toil are: the dissolution or “explosion” of narrative (not merely a radical revision of telling, but an absence of telling altogether, or of linearity in any form); the elimination of social boundaries, most prominently that between binary oppositions (in relation to drama, this means the erasure of protagonist/antagonist conflict, but the gender warriors have predictably seized upon it to undercut normative heterosexual oppositions); elimination also of psychology, and of history itself except for the purposes of radical (i. e., adversarial) interpretation. The work of Castorf at the Volksbühne was always controversial, but so far as I can tell he devolved from a mere advocate of neo-avant-garde “creative destruction” to an outright cultural nihilist, as exemplified by his 2013 Bayreuth production of Der Ring des Nibelungen.^(I)

However aesthetically removed our American musicals may be from Wagner’s Ring or Schiller’s Die Räuber (another Castorf target and, devotees will recall, the basis of Verdi’s I Masnadieri), it’s not hard to recognize these “postdramatic” concepts at work in the secondary market of Fish’s desexualized no-story, no-place, no-characters, no-past-or-future skimthrough of Happy Fella. And the skimthrough reflected another postmodern proposition, that of timeless time. This goes well beyond the sorts of “cinematic flow” that many directors have attempted to impose on stage realities, and onward to an ungraspable streaming, the passing-by of indefinable scraps of experience, actions of anonymous individuals in a floating environment, to which no meaning can be ascribed save that of the streaming per se. All the more reason to cherish Matthis’ solos, which momentarily interrupted the flow with the durations and tempos of the songs themselves, and established, for a time, a time that was not timeless.