NORTHAMPTON, Mass.
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Exclusive Music Video: 'Young@Heart'
BEL canto it’s not. When the members of the Young@Heart Chorus take the stage in Stephen Walker’s documentary, their voices are less noticeable than their stooped shoulders, shuffling feet and white hair — not to mention their material, an unlikely mix of punk provocations, rock affirmations and teenage angst.
But when a few of them sit down to tea and doughnuts to talk about their impending brush with movie stardom, what comes through most vividly is not their age or their musical gifts but their irrepressible goofiness. Stan Goldman, the youngest at 78, reaches for a banana, saying, “It has a-peel.” The others groan on cue, but they are hardly blameless. Jeanne Hatch, 81, starting an anecdote that begins with her making her way to the bathroom, quickly interrupts herself: “That’s sort of my hobby — going to the bathroom.” Fred Knittle, 82, keeps up a running stream of patter, much of it at the expense of his wife of 57 years. “You don’t have to laugh,” Barbara Knittle says to the rest of us. But everyone does. A lot.
The Fred and Barbara show is reminiscent of the routine they do in the film, “Young@Heart.” Ms. Knittle, who is not a member, has even baked the same cranberry bread she serves in the movie, which opens Wednesday. Part concert film, part music video, part reportage, “Young@Heart” follows members of the chorus for seven weeks as they mug for the camera (and one another), as they rehearse their songs, as they perform them. And, in their one nod to bel canto, as they die.
Mr. Walker, whose work for the BBC has included documentaries on Hiroshima, a porn star and a Jewish wedding, first saw Young@Heart at a 2005 concert in London. It was at the insistence of Sally George, his partner in film and life, and he was less than enthusiastic.
“Initially I thought it was some kind of weird gimmick,” he said by telephone from Los Angeles, where he and the group’s founder and director, Bob Cilman, were promoting the film. “I really was prepared to leave after 10 minutes.” He stayed, awed not just by the performance but also by the clamorous reaction in a theater “packed with every single age group.” He went chasing after Mr. Cilman and finally won permission to film life with the Hearts, as they like to call themselves.
Both on film and in person, they know part of their job is to be adorable old people, and they’re very good at it. The camera captures them rolling their eyes and putting their fingers in their ears as they hear Sonic Youth’s “Schizophrenia” for the first time. It eavesdrops as two of them try to figure out which way is up, literally, when Mr. Cilman gives them a Talking Heads CD to listen to.
Similarly, in the Knittles’ living room, Patricia Larese, 79, wrinkles her nose as she recalls one of her “wacky” solos: “It was called ‘Whip It.’ Have you ever heard of it?” Mr. Goldman, who is forgoing the Metropolitan Opera broadcast to attend this tea party, has a question too: “Are you familiar with David Byrne?”
If the Hearts are in some ways strangers in a strange land, they have also managed to negotiate the sometimes barren landscape of old age with consummate grace. Even in the midst of the high-spirited joshing and the reminiscences about old shows and old friends, there’s no avoiding the references, however glancing, to hospitals, rehab centers and funerals. Strictly speaking, Mr. Knittle is a former Heart, although he still makes guest appearances, because he can’t stray too far from his oxygen tank. Mr. Goldman sums up the prevailing attitude: “At this stage of the game if you don’t keep moving, you’re going to be a target for something serious.”
This becomes manifest in the movie as first one singer and then another succumbs to the final “something serious.” It’s tempting to think that on some level Mr. Walker, 46, welcomed the intrusion of life-and-death drama into his story about a volunteer chorus of sweet oldsters singing rock ’n’ roll. But, he said, “it just knocks you sideways.” His first thought was that perhaps he couldn’t go on with the project at all. “The narrative actually becomes much more complicated,” he said. “It was desperately upsetting.”
Mr. Walker is not the only filmmaker to seize on geriatric performers as subject matter. “Hats Off,” Jyll Johnston’s documentary about the 93-year-old actress Mimi Weddell, opened at the end of March. And Dori Berinstein’s “Gotta Dance,” which has its premiere later this month at the Tribeca Film Festival, follows the members of the New Jersey Nets’ senior dance team, ages 59 to 83, from auditions to on-court hip-hop maneuvers. But while the dance team began as a Nets promotional stunt, Young@Heart began at a housing project here for the elderly, in 1982, and its members never expected to entertain anyone but themselves.
The original choristers are gone now, except for Mr. Cilman. Now 54, he had been kicking around the Northampton arts scene with a variety of projects, none of them making any money. He took a job dispensing meals at the housing project, and the idea of a resident chorus caught on. He arranged collaborations with other local performers: break dancers, a theater troupe, a gay chorus. The theater company brought them to a festival in the Netherlands in 1997, and Young@Heart has toured abroad ever since.
“Other people worry about what’s going to be in the dressing room when they arrive,” Mr. Cilman said. “We worry about what we might trip on on the way to the dressing room.”
He also worries that the film may typecast Young@Heart. “What we do is live theater work,” he said. “It’s never been exclusively about singing rock ’n’ roll.”
But he would seem to have an uphill battle there. Even Mr. Knittle, who in one show played Bill Clinton singing “Go Away Little Girl” to Ms. Hatch’s Monica Lewinsky, echoes the movie’s take when he characterizes Mr. Cilman’s musical taste: “Whatever we told our kids to turn down or turn off, he gives us.”