Literary allusion can be belaboring, but here it works. They borrow heavily from Dante, only where Dante had but nine circles of Hell to traverse in the Inferno, the brothers have over 1,000. Just as Dante had Virgil as his guide, so too do we discover that that their father’s real name is Virgil. To be honest this revelation could probably have been saved for later in the narrative, one of my few criticisms in this excellent ‘music-less opera,’but I will not begrudge the occasional risk that misses the mark, so ambitious is this stupendous undertaking. Like the Virgil of Dante, their father will lead them safely through the eternal torments, level by level, from live/not-live Aerosmith albums to “adult contemporary garbage” to 14 episodes of the Alman Brothers.
I am tempted to deconstruct the phrase “14 episodes of the Alman Brothers.” The large number points to the significance the Jefts place on the band; the fact that the band are brothers, just like the show’s hosts, radiates a personal connection; the way the band’s name could be pronounced ‘All-Man Brothers’ juxtaposes with the opposite way the Jefts approach gender roles — Shawn the brash and hyper-masculine athlete and burgeoning family man, confident enough to travel the world with a gay rugby team, and Cameron, the soft-spoken homosexual theater-geek, whose every word sounds like a shy flirt. I wonder, as Shawn and Cameron were developing Pop/Rock, if all of the implicit metaphorical underpinnings were intentional, or just most of them.
I don’t want to give away too many surprises. Suffice to say, the casual listener will be thrown into a maelstrom of music, heritage, criticism, and humor. For those willing to plunge deep into identity and ontology, the experience will be richly rewarding.
