BWW Preview: Travel Back to DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED With Standing Room Only

It's not easy to pin down Standing Room Only's DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED, the upcoming one-act "special event" featuring music from the Moody Blues. It's a concert, or is it a cabaret? It's a musical, of the jukebox variety, but it's almost operatic, and a fringe theatre event. It's a journey. However you want to describe it, despite being built around music from 1967, it's definitely more than just nostalgia.

Though creator Wayne Landon will admit, there's a little of that longing for the old days too.

"We all listened to vinyl," reminisces Landon. "All day long, all night long, everywhere we went. We didn't watch TV; I don't remember watching TV at all hardly. Whether we were smoking, drinking, partying - I don't care what we were doing, we had an album going."

"It's just the way we kind of existed."

Landon says after the success of SRO productions like AMERICAN IDIOT, he began looking back at groups that created concept albums - including those from his youth in the late '60s and early '70s, one of which was the Moody Blues, and their 1967 album Days of Future Passed. Released after The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's, Landon says the Moodies' second album went in "a totally unexpected direction, into orchestrated rock n roll music" like no one had ever heard before, and served as a precursor to The Who's Tommy and Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar. But despite the scope of the album, bringing Days of Future Passed to the stage has had its challenges.

"With something like this," says director Chris Patton, "you're working with possibly a thin thread. You can say this about AMERICAN IDIOT and many other jukebox-type musicals. It's about the music and the songs first, and its later that, even if it's a concept album, it's later that someone decides to make it a theatrical event.

"I don't think any band ever sits down to write a concept album thinking 'let's put this on a stage,'" adds Patton. "They're focused on maybe an idea or a thread of an idea that they just sort of expound on in their jamming. But when a director, or a creator like Wayne, wants to turn it into something theatrical, you've got to dig a little deeper for the narrative."

Landon says the story arc they've created explores the same concepts the Moody Blues created in their album: "the experience of every man as he goes through the day, from the time he wakes to the time he goes to sleep."

"I think it's always worth revisiting the story of the everyman," says Patton. "I think at the end of the day, it's really everybody's story. It's what you lie in bed at night thinking about; it's what you'll wake up in the morning thinking about: What am I doing here and what is my journey? Not only what is the 'meaning of life' [or] 'what's my purpose,' but even just what am I doing today."

Simply put, says Patton, "Maybe [DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED] is a rock n roll attempt to delve into one day, four people trying to figure out what they're doing in the world for [a] day."

Regardless of how you want to define it, Landon says, "I'm pretty convinced that [the audience is] going to see something that they've never seen before."

Performances of DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED are 8 p.m. Thursday, October 20 through Saturday, October 22 at Obsidian Theater, 3522 White Oak. For more information, call 713-300-2358 or visit sro-productions.com. $15 to $30.