Lennon: Through a Glass Onion – Daniel Taylor with Stewart D’Arrietta perform songs of Lennon and Lennon/McCartney, Kay Meek Centre, Friday, Nov. 11 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $42.50.
To mark the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ arrival in the United States, Cary Schneider of the Los Angeles Times collected a few notable reviews the group received following that first historic performance on the Ed Sullivan Show.
The “appallingly unmusical” quartet would be best left to the tentacles of an octopus, wrote conservative pundit and self-professed non crypto-fascist William F. Buckley.
Nearly every critic of the day devoted some of their artistry to the Fab Four’s haircuts, describing the mop tops as “great pudding bowls” and “bizarre shrubbery.”
The audience are either apes, young ladies enjoying a moment of hysterical rapture before returning to the path of motherhood, or actors in a lurid capitalist conspiracy make the band appear talented.
But the most memorable line, written by a surely-disappointed wag for the Hartford Courant, was simply this: “Stiff lip, old chap, even The Beatles will pass!”
Speaking from his hotel in Kelowna, actor and singer Daniel Taylor cheerfully talks about playing John Lennon and about the enthusiasm that commonly greets Lennon: Through a Glass Onion.
“We get standing ovations everywhere so I think we’re doing something right,” he says. “I’m really chuffed.”
In the last moment of Lennon’s life, after Mark David Chapman has fired but before his bullets rob the world, the show unfolds.
Through a Glass Onion (named for Lennon’s White Album encapsulation of The Beatles) is what flashed through Lennon’s eyes, Taylor explains.
His relationships with his aunt, mother and absentee father wind through some of Lennon’s most biographical songs.
“It’s very warts and all,” Taylor says of the show.
The show refers to the days when Lennon and McCartney were in their musical infancy, tramping around Liverpool looking for a “mate that could play” their missing chord so they could carry on with their songwriting, Taylor notes.
Lennon’s wit, generosity, and temper are marbled into reminiscences about his days as a “thorn in the American government’s backside” and his compulsion to leave the world’s most famous band.
“I play John as if John’s very much on the stage,” Taylor says. “We have this tremendous lighting, the way it falls on me, it freaks me out.”
Taylor has an impressive grasp of Lennon, taking time during our interview to note the way Lennon’s mid-Atlantic twang flattened his Liverpool inflections during his New York days, turning “rec-ords” into “rec-erds.”
Besides bearing a certain resemblance to the singer, Taylor (as one might guess after he uses the word “chuffed”) is a fellow Liverpudlian.
“They used to knock around in the same village as my mum and dad,” Taylor says of the Beatles.
Besides going to school with original drummer Pete Best, Taylor’s mother was a regular at joints like the Cavern Club and the Casbah Coffee Club – places North American Beatles’ fans have only ever seen in black and white.
But it was only recently Taylor took the time to ask his mother what the Beatles represented to her.
“She said, ‘They represented freedom.’”
Taylor has played Lennon on stage twice now, the first in a play that supposes Mark David Chapman was an assassin brainwashed by the government.
“I didn’t really have any songs to sing in that,” Taylor notes.
In Through a Glass Onion, he has 31 songs, including “Jealous Guy,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and “Working Class Hero.”
“I think the one you don’t want to balls up is ‘Imagine,’” Taylor says with a laugh, describing the tune as “pretty much in all our DNA.”
More than a half-century after Lennon set foot in North America, his music still rouses audiences.
The Beatles may pass old chap, but not yet.
