James Valcq's one-man show a homage to eccentric composer Erik Satie

In his splendid book on the French avant-garde during the 30 years preceding World War I, Roger Shattuck describes composer Erik Satie as “a musician more heard of than heard.”

James Valcq is trying to do something about that in “Velvet Gentleman,” a two-hour (with intermission), one-actor show that he created and in which he himself embodies Satie.  Under Robert Boles’ direction, it’s receiving its world premiere in a production that opened Thursday night at Third Avenue Playhouse in Sturgeon Bay. 

Valcq takes his title from the way Satie dressed: seven seemingly identical velvet suits, one for each day of the week.  

Satie cultivated many such eccentricities, and Valcq captures both the studied affectation and the puckish quality that accompanied it.  As reflected through Valcq’s selection from Satie’s voluminous, often aphoristic writing, this musician was nearly always looking at things askance, gently mocking the society in which he lived in an effort to see it new.

Standing at a lectern, Valcq’s Satie ruminates on what he loves about animals, before taking a left turn to confess how much he enjoys smoked salmon and beef.  He includes directions on interpreting his music such as “like a nightingale with a toothache.”  At the debut of a ballet for which he wrote the music, Satie joined those catcalling audience members whistling it down.

Valcq indicated during a post-show talkback Thursday that some 80% of the text for “Velvet Gentleman” comes from Satie’s own writings, with the rest involving Valcq’s efforts to give this material a through-line describing a life.  

But while Valcq begins with Satie’s birth and concludes with a hint of Satie’s own bleak end (he died of cirrhosis of the liver at 59), those extras don’t yield much sense of Satie’s life or of the often sad, lonely and romantic man behind the clownish mask.  The Satie seen here resembles a quirky stand-up comic, presenting short segments that play like unconnected notes.     

Not surprisingly, the show’s strength is its music, with Valcq on piano or, in one hauntingly rendered moment, using an accordion to play the aching melody of Satie’s best-known piece: “Gymnopédie No. 1.”  

Valcq’s time at the piano is frequently supplemented by projections featuring Satie’s drawings and surrealistic, poetic textual notations to his music.  These are particularly fine when used in conjunction with snippets from Satie’s “Sports et divertissements,” in which Satie chronicles and also sends up pastimes from yachting to tango dancing.   

Satie’s usually short pieces can feel like still-life studies or variations on a theme; they don’t so much move forward as in circles.  Ditto “Velvet Gentleman”; it doesn’t have much dynamism or drama.  But even when it stands still, “Velvet Gentleman” honors Valcq’s subject by offering us a new way of seeing, whether the object be a lantern, a helmet or Satie himself.

“The Velvet Gentleman” continues through June 4 at Third Avenue Playhouse, 239 N. 3rd Ave. in Sturgeon Bay.  For tickets, visit thirdavenueplayhouse.com/.  Read more about this production at Tap Milwaukee.com.

PROGRAM NOTES 

“Let’s Move On”: So Valcq’s Satie continually tells us in this piece, allowing him (and Valcq) to bypass parts of his life on which he’d rather not dwell.  It can give a choppy quality to what’s presented here, as though Valcq is trying to include as many interesting snippets about Satie as possible.  But those many disparate parts never quite cohere into a whole: One gets a sense of Satie’s temperament, but less sense of the underlying life.  

Life is a Cabaret: That constant moving is also true to the restlessness within Satie himself, whose preemptive comic deflections often mask underlying pathos, which comes through in his music.  And not just instrumental music, either: Satie also spent years playing in Montmartre bars and writing for cabaret acts.  In a show that has a bit of everything, Valcq includes a Satie song, sung here in the original French (and translated for the audience on a video screen at house left).

Video courtesy of Andrew Kleidon-Lindstrom / TAP

Satie’s Prohibition: Valcq repeats Satie’s playful prohibition, included in the score to a 1914 piece, prohibiting “any person to read the texts aloud during the period of musical performance. Every infraction will arouse my just indignation against the culprit.”  Valcq gets around this admonition by silently projecting Satie’s texts – written directly into Satie’s scores – as he plays. It’s wonderful. “Sports et divertissements” means much more when, even as Valcq plays the music for a section like “Yachting,” we can see a drawing of a spoiled young woman that was created to accompany this music, itself fleshed out by a transcription of Satie’s text as written into the score: “I’d rather do something else. Go fetch me a car.”

Parodies Lost: Not all of Satie’s parodies are so accessible; many of those baked into the music itself are now beyond us.  Valcq plays a number of pieces, including “Descriptions automatiques” (“Automatic Descriptions”) and “Embryons desséchés (“Desiccated embryos”), sending up popular 18th- and 19th-century songs that won’t be familiar to most of us.  Here, again, the inclusion in “Velvet Gentleman” of Satie’s drawings and textual notations is enormously helpful in allowing us to appreciate other aspects of Satie’s humor, compensating for what we miss.  

Satie and Picasso: Satie’s collaboration with Picasso (as well as Cocteau and Diaghilev) on the controversial ballet “Parade” gets brief treatment in “Velvet Gentleman,” while also calling to mind one of Shattuck’s perceptive observations in writing on Satie in his aforementioned book on the French avant-garde (“The Banquet Years”): Satie’s ability to simultaneously see an object from different perspectives, as presented in multiple compositions taking the same shape, is reminiscent of cubism. “Out of this sameness,” Shattuck writes, “comes subtle variety.”

On a broader scale, one might apply Shattuck’s insight to Valcq’s piece, seen as an elaborate series of variations on the theme of Satie. Viewed this way, the drama in “Velvet Gentleman” isn’t generated by the passage of time, but rather by multiple perspectives viewed from a confined space: it’s as though we’re making our way around a gallery room featuring various miniatures by a particular artist, with each piece we see adding to our portrait of the artist himself.