St. Petersburg Times - MAXWELL article
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When Joe Popp moved to New York in 2000, he figured he was finished with the Tampa Bay area, where he was singer and
guitarist in the popular punk bands Dogs on Ice and Joe Popp.
"I felt like I did everything I could do in Florida," said Popp, who now lives in Brooklyn and manages a recording studio.
Still, Popp retains Tampa Bay ties, and one of them is with Jobsite Theater, which encouraged him to return to what set him
apart from the rock 'n' roll pack. This weekend, Jobsite will premiere his new rock musical MAXWELL, directed by R.M.
("ranney") Lawrence, in the Shimberg Playhouse of Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.
"I've been working on it off and on since 1997," said Popp, 36, who was a sound engineer at TBPAC. He once hoped to stage
his musical in the atmospheric old Tampa Theatre.
"It's inspired a lot by science-fiction, robot-type movies. It's based loosely on my life experience, my parents being
working-class people, some of my pain that I've dealt with. There are a few rants in there."
A press release describes MAXWELL as "the story of Joseph Maxwell, a prodigal genius born to working-class parents who,
under the tutelage of Stephen Hawking, devises a plan to end mankind's need to work, starve, suffer or toil" with the invention
of a super- fantastic gizmo called the Maxwell Machine that "perfects real time intelligence."
Popp wrote 16 songs for the show, as well as incidental music, such as transitions and underscoring dialogue. The Jobsite cast,
featuring David Jenkins in the title role and Ami Sallee Corley as Maxwell's mother, will perform to a prerecorded score Popp
devised in the studio.
"There's real heavy guitar on some stuff," Popp said. "It's very eclectic - all over the place - but I think my current runs through
it."
MAXWELL is Popp's third time around in the genre. His first effort, a punk treatment of Macbeth, was a smash hit for American
Stage's Shakespeare in the Park in 1997. Whirligig, his follow-up two years later, was a rock adaptation of a Mac Wellman play
that flopped.
What did Popp learn from the previous ventures?
"I learned to keep control and work with people that you really like," he said. "Lisa (Powers, director of Macbeth) was really
tough to work for, but I loved her because she got really good results. It was very daring but still very tasteful. Whirligig was
just daring but not very tasteful."
Popp agreed with reviews that slammed Whirligig, directed by Wendy Leigh. Yet he was disenchanted by the tepid turnout for
the production at TBPAC's Jaeb Theater.
"We did this big show and nobody showed up. People didn't even give it a chance. I wasn't too fond of the show myself,
really, but we didn't get any audience. That was pretty disappointing."
Support for theater is one of the things Popp likes about New York. In fact, after MAXWELL completes its Tampa run, he has
arranged for Jobsite to perform it at the Galapagos Art Space in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn Feb. 1-2.
"The thing about New York, you do stuff, and people come," he said. "There are so many more young people who want to do
things, especially in Williamsburg. There's supposedly more professional artists here per square mile than anywhere else in the
world. So it's going to sell out both nights. I'm not even worried about that."
Because of his job in New York, Popp was not closely involved with Jobsite rehearsals. He visited Tampa one weekend in
December and planned to attend the opening two performances.
The recording studio where he works is in lower Manhattan. Popp was there on the morning of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11.
"The studio is about a mile from ground zero," he said. "I ended up walking home over the Williamsburg Bridge. It was
horrific. It felt like we were leaving a war zone. You'd look back over your shoulder and just see these big smoking plumes
coming out of the bottom of Manhattan."
Popp was toiling on MAXWELL at the time.
"It affected me personally," he said. "I'm trying to finish this play, and these buildings blow up. You think, 'This isn't
important at all. I'm suffering over these guitar lines and the country's blowing up.' As an artist, it makes you question if
anything you do is permanent, does it really mean anything, what's the point of it all?"
The final draft of MAXWELL includes references to anthrax and "how hypocritical war is," said Popp, who also decided, as a
consequence of the tragedy, to connect with family members in Florida and North Carolina.
"It kind of made me rethink things," he said. "So I went and visited my sister and my family and started to do those things that I
had been negligent about."
Rock musical marks artist's return to bay area
BY JOHN FLEMING
published January 4, 2002