Just as the stages of large theaters are sometimes repurposed as outrageously well-outfitted lab and black box theaters unto themselves, with the audience seated on stage and the closed curtain metaphorically hardened into a rippled wall, so the elegant and spacious bar area at the Bearsville Theater—the Lounge, as it has been known across the decades—makes for a darn fine small venue in its own right.
In both cases, the arrangement speaks to a heightened focus, the carving of a reduced-scope intimacy out of a commercial space meant for bigger things. As an audience member, you carry the awareness of that larger space, hulking and dark, right next to you the whole time. It’s almost a little scary, a dark theater right there, but it feels intentional—we’re choosing to huddle together tonight; we don’t have to do it this way. And yet it is not hard to understand why this is done relatively rarely. To a bottom-line-oriented business, that dark hulking space—unseen but mere feet away—represents a hungry void of uncompensated resource consumption.
So finding the right commercial balance is tough, but the new Bearsville Theater is dipping its toes back into the idea of the Lounge show, resuming on Tuesday, Oct. 21, and they are doing it with a clinical, pitch-perfect example of what the Lounge is suited for: a solo, cognoscenti, prestige booking of a highly respected musician’s musician. Mike Viola is one of those artists that you know whether or not you know it. As producer, player, songwriter, composer and performer, Viola has been a high-level collaborator of Andrew Bird, Panic! at the Disco, Mandy Moore, J.S. Ondara, and the proverbial but actual countless others in the new century.
If for no other reason, you know Viola as the singer and co-producer of “That Thing You Do!,” the fictional hit single from the Tom Hanks film of the same name, a song that insinuated its way into the collective ear until it became an actual hit single. You probably also know him from the songs he provided for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Britney Spears once said that anyone can write a stupid art song. The hard thing is writing a hit. Like his close friend, the late, great Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne, Mike Viola is one of those cats you call when you need something that sounds exactly like a hit.
None of those associated luminaries will be on stage on Oct. 21, of course. What will be on display is Viola’s long, prolific and cultic career as his own artist, beginning with his New York City band Candy Butchers in the late ’90s and proceeding through a run of seven or eight critically admired solo records produced concurrently with all that high-level industry work described above. You get the idea. The guy is an irrepressible song-making machine.
In his own labor-of-love work, the muse is really out of its cage. He reveals himself as a profoundly resourceful composer, a skilled and clever guitarist, and an unpredictable lyricist. Viola has literally all the pop tricks up his sleeve, but he manages it all with an abiding commitment to accessibility and concision and a studio aesthetic that is relatively bare-bones. It’s all done with what you might call a New York edge (even though he’s a native of the greater Boston area). His genre is probably best described as power pop, albeit a tense New York variant on the form that owes as much to the dry, guitaristic innovation of Television as to the Bay City Rollers.
The power pop genre divides its artists somewhat messily along the connotations of its two constituent words. There are those who are more power and those who are more pop, though both are—by definition—both. Chief among the former: Cheap Trick and the countless bands of the tempo-hungry, singalong pop punk variant. Power pop will never be mistaken for a three-chords-and-the-truth style, but among these harder-rocking Ramones sympathizers, the florid pop elements are denuded, the lower gears generally unused, the harmonic content limited to the essentials.
Chief among the latter, we find the sweetly McCartney-esque tunefulness of such cult heroes as Emitt Rhodes; the smart eccentricity and prog-in-pop packaging of XTC; the scholarly omni-pop fluencies of such stylistic savants as Fountains of Wayne; the blues-rich pop gumbo of Big Star; and the whole division of unashamed saccharine lovers and Archies fans. Bands like the Left Banke—bands with a generous dollop of treacle in their concoctions and barely an ounce of pure power—are among the wellsprings of the style, though not power pop themselves. If there is no trace of cloying sweetness in the mix, it is probably best not to call it power pop.
Some bands—L.A. cult pop heroes Jellyfish come to mind—maxed out both meters, fusing a sardonically over-the-top pop extravagance with the metal-adjacent heft and thrust of early Queen records. That’s power pop with two capital Ps. But the other truth that Jellyfish perfectly demonstrates is that power pop is, almost across the board, not popular. It is, as one critic described XTC, “unpopular pop music.” Brainy, out of step with the times, unconcerned with “authenticity” in an era obsessed with it, power pop tends to be a cult concern.
What makes Mike Viola’s music power pop is its twin devotion to a) musical and harmonic sophistication and b) the directness and bare-bones sonics not just of rock but of rock in the Velvet Underground tradition: naked, exposed, unfussy in arrangement and delivery. In the solo format, it is not hard to imagine both virtues of his music—the expansive musical content of it and the raw urgency—shining on the Lounge stage.
Opening the show, in a pleasant twist, will be Frank Bango, a locally residing, credentialed songwriter of NYC provenance who also happens to be the current manager of the Bearsville Theater. This is no vanity booking—Bango is a legit and accomplished recording artist, a songwriter who (along with his career-long collaborator, lyricist Richy Vesecky) operates loosely in the tradition of Ray Davies, Graham Parker and Elvis Costello, blended perhaps with some of the pop surrealism and high silliness of Robyn Hitchcock or They Might Be Giants. Bango’s most recent record, The Truth Fox, ranked as one of my favorite releases of 2023 by anyone, anywhere.
Frank has been the house manager at the Bearsville since the theater’s operation was taken over by Peter Shapiro and Dayglo Productions, the same organization behind the Capitol Theater in Westchester and Brooklyn Bowl. Two of Shapiro’s first moves were to hire Mike Campbell as talent buyer—the same Mike Campbell who so enlivened the action down at Colony on the other side of town in recent years—and Frank Bango as manager, a role he had played for years at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan.
“The Lounge really is a great little venue,” reflects Bango. “From the moment we took over the theater, it was something we all talked about. But since most of our staffing and infrastructure is focused on promoting shows in the big room, it takes a little extra thought to scale things down for the front room and still make it feel like a full experience for both the artist and the audience.”
Woodstock, of course, is well served by a number of smaller rooms that cater to local talent as well as touring nationals, so the Bearsville is not likely to make its nut with an intensive focus on the local. “Bearsville Theater is more of a destination because we’re tucked away at the far end of Woodstock,” says Bango. “We don’t get the same walk-up traffic that a bar in town might. That means we really have to book artists people are willing to come here for, just to make the economics work.
“We definitely want to keep doing Lounge shows, though I’m not sure how regular the frequency will be. For me, the big thing is keeping it curated. I want people to feel that a show in the Lounge is every bit as legit as one in the main theater—just aimed at a different kind of artist.”
“I’m a big Mike Viola fan,” Bango enthuses. “In my mind, he’s the quintessential Lounge booking because I know he can completely hold a room’s attention with just his voice and a guitar. I first saw him years ago when he was fronting the Candy Butchers down on the Lower East Side. Pete Donnelly from the Figgs was on bass, and it was one of the most exciting shows I’d seen in a long time—just pure, melodic power pop.
“I’ve followed his work ever since. His talents kept expanding—he became a sideman, a producer, and this kind of quietly influential figure behind the scenes. But it’s that smaller, cult career that’s always spoken to me. He’s a real songwriter. His stuff feels personal and expressive, never by the numbers. There’s always a distinct point of view behind what he does.
“As for how the booking came together, I just reached out to him and invited him. That’s the other nice thing about the Bearsville Theater reawakening. Lots of artists can’t wait to check it out and play here again. He mentioned he was doing an acoustic tour but thought it might be too late to route it. Then when Mike Campbell, our talent buyer, connected with his agent, they were able to make it work. I’m really glad they did—it’s the perfect match for the Lounge.”
Mike Viola and Frank Bango perform at the Bearsville Theater Lounge, 291 Tinker Street, Woodstock, on Tuesday, Oct. 21, doors at 7 p.m., music at 8 p.m. For tickets and additional information, visit bearsvilletheater.com.
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