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Get Me Rodd Keith!!

by Joshua Pollock
review in SF Bay Guardian April 26,2000 by Brad Rosenstein

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Remember those magazine ads saying "Send us your poems and
we'll send you back a hit song"? The song-poem industry was a
1970s scam, and Joshua Pollock's Get Me Rodd Keith!! (written
with Sean Owens) is a fictionalized "quasi-musical" based on a
legendary figure in this armpit of the music industry. Keith was a
session musician who aspired to the heights, but his sole genius
lay in creating oddly catchy tunes for the hopeless poetry sent in by
aspiring lyricists.

The piece begins well with a fizzy, original energy, intercutting
over-the-top satire of this venal enterprise with lively performances
of some of the actual music it spawned, including such classics as
"Disco Dancer, You're the Answer." But the show can't decide just
how seriously it wants to take Keith, and quickly loses its camp
edge, not to mention any hold on its story. The joke runs out early
in the endless second act, which degenerates into sophomoric
silliness and way too many songs.

A number of local band members are in the cast of this
Misery/Loves Company production, and musically the show cooks.
The acting is another matter, including Pollock's flat Keith,
although deadpan Phil Worman brings out the best in the appalling
songs, and whenever Owens is onstage, this bizarre pastiche
starts to fly. Director Meredith Eldred has fun turning the cast's
amateurishness to her advantage, and Valera Coble's costumes
are a polyester nightmare. But the show gets lost somewhere
between spotlighting the pathos implied in its retro cheesiness
and simply rolling over it with a disco ball.

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