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What You Wish For? A Musical of Safety Not Guaranteed
Guster’s singer-songwriter Ryan Miller tries his hand at musical theater.
The elder-millennial faves are on the musical march: Sufjan Stevens and Will Butler have visited Broadway, soon to be joined by the Avett Brothers, and now, at BAM’s Next Wave festival, Guster ’s Ryan Miller is reimagining his score for the 2012 indie film Safety Not Guaranteed, setting new (and some old) lyrics to its story of longing, regret, and possible time travel. “They take you right back.” It’s a clever little nod from book writer Nick Blaemire: Not only are Guster’s songs themselves rife with nostalgia (“I want to relive all my adolescent dreams,” sings Miller in “One-Man Wrecking Machine”), they’re also exactly the kind of band that, if you’re a child of their heyday, will deliver a rush of early-aughts sense memory at the very mention of their name. There’s something about the Harvey’s scale and atmosphere — the peeling proscenium, the shades of Lev Dodin, Thomas Ostermeier, and Peter Brook — that seems to have stranded Safety ’s director, Lee Sunday Evans, and scenic designer, Krit Robinson, somewhere between scrappy minimalism and bigger, slicker musical-theater impulses.
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