The Only Tragicomic One-man Ukulele Operetta Worth Seeing

K. Brian Neel in “Vaud Rats” at the Balagan Theatre. Photo by Jennifer Marie.

“King’s Elephant, the improvisational company, disbanded, we closed up shop, and I had put a lot of focus and energy into that company. But I was just starting to reach the point of making a go at making a living in the theatre,” said K. Brian Neel the other evening, by way of explanation of how he became a solo performer, as we sat chatting over coffee at Caffè Vita, just up the street from the Balagan Theatre, where Neel’s one-man ukulele operetta Vaud Rats is playing through Jan. 16 (tickets $12-$16).

“And after six months of so of asking, ‘What am I going to do? Should I audition, should I learn monologues?’, I just had this moment of, ‘I know how to create shows! I’ve been creating original shows for nine years. I know how to develop original work.’”

Neel has been something of a fixture in Seattle experimental and fringe theatre for twenty years now. A native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, he relocated to Seattle in the late 1980s with King’s Elephant Theatre, an improv troupe, just in time for the heyday of the Nineties fringe theatre. Following their disbandment around 1994/5, Neel began pursuing a career as a solo performer with a sci-fi trilogy called The 42nd Floor in 1995. From there on, Neel began splitting his time between work with the Seattle Mime Theatre and solo work touring the summer festival circuit.

By 2003, he was well-established enough to be commissioned by the Seattle Fringe Festival to produce Omon Ra, an adaptation of the novel by Russian postmodernist Viktor Pelevin. In later years, he’s continued working both as a solo performer as well as a regular collaborator with Helsinki Syndrome, as well as various acting and directing projects. In November, he directed the well-received production of Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree at Theatre Schmeater (a two-person play in which only one actor knows the script; the second actor changes each night), and in February, he will be appearing in the adaptation of David James Duncan’s The River Why at Book-It.

Vaud Rats is the show that Neel’s been with longest. Originally developed in 2004 out of Neel’s growing interest in both the ukulele and vaudeville, it’s been developed in a series of forward lurches ever since.

“When I first crafted it and did a workshop performance of it at Union Garage, I didn’t do anything with it,” he explained. “I was directing at the time and doing other shows, and moving in other directions. So after the workshop, I just sat on it for a few years, and then when I re-entered three years ago, and took it on tour, I took another break, mid-tour. I felt I’d just started to get it on its feet, and take it out into the world, and then I stopped to build a house. I took a good year-and-a-half off.”

“I really pulled out for a year-and-a-half, to build this house. That was my world. I was really just all day and sometimes all night building this bastard. I didn’t quit theatre out of a burn-out or anything, this was just my mano a mano with nature sort of deal,” he said with a side-long grin. “I’m very feminine, and I had to beef-up my manhood.”

Photo by Eduardo Brambila

The show tells the story of Cecil B. DeUkulele, a washed-up vaudeville performer whose shtick is the uke. From the beginning of his career upstaging a comic actress through his rise to the top vaudeville circuit to his eventual fall via a love-affair with a accordion-playing midget in an abusive relationship with a Russian strongman, Vaud Rats is both a charmingly executed story and an homage to the tradition of vaudeville.

“We either have one of two feelings about it,” Neel said of vaudeville. “We’re either derogatory about it, from seeing the really cheesy, crappy clips–you know, that stereotype–or we just don’t know about it all. But you know, all the entertainment we have today was derived from it.”

While Neel’s performance is centered around his character’s ukulele playing, he manages a couple brilliant bits, including a two-man comic routine. The trick of switching between multiple characters in a dialogue–to say nothing of rapid-fire comedy–is always one of the riskiest things in solo performance, but Neel’s delivery is damn near flawless. “A lot of performers have this big transition,” he told me, “They’re like da-da-da-da, pause.” He stops, eyes wide and holding his breath for effect. “And then switch. But the key is, establish the details of the characters early on, then just switch back and forth like that,” he concluded, snapping his fingers.

Musically, Vaud Rats is also a remarkable piece. Going in, you could be forgiven for supposing that a ukulele shtick wouldn’t be sustainable for ninety minutes, but Neel’s approach to much-abused instrument is expansive.

“The style of uke playing is more songsmith than a Hawaiian ukelele player,” he said. “There’s lots of finger-picking, lots of nostalgia songs for country and blues to more, like, ballads and Sondheim-type stuff.”

Vaud Rats comes off as a virtuosic performance on Neel’s part, a series of richly detailed song-and-dance numbers, interspersed with comic repartee in the service of a rather affecting overall story, Cecil’s pain and suffering slipping through the cracks of his vaudevillian persona. In so far as that’s the case, it owes a lot to the show’s long development process and the contributions of numerous other artists. “The way I originally approached Vaud Rats was I wanted different directors to take each of the songs,” said Neel, “to have different directors and choreographers to come in and direct the vignettes, and then get an overall arcing director.”

The result is impressive. The show balances its humor and shtick with a powerful, even tragic, emotional core that puts a lot of solo performance–all too much of which relies on the narcissistic excavation of none-too-interesting personal experience in monologue form–to shame. As Neel put it, “I think if you have a great story to tell, then fucking tell it. If you don’t, shut up. And that’s a lot of solo performance, it’s ‘Well, I’ve got a story…I’ll tell it!’ And I’m, ‘No, that’s boring!’”