Talk:Thing-Fish
Moved from Background Info:
In April 1984, Zappa published a 21-page text extract (plus photos) of the musical comedy "Thing-Fish" in the pornographic magazine Hustler. Seven months later, the soundtrack was released but the staging of this work never took place. The title character's name was derived from "Kingfish", a stereotypically black character from the 1952 TV show Amos & Andy. Thing-Fish speaks in a similar accent, and narrates the story of a young couple who desperately try to fit in and go to any lengths to accomplish their impossible goals.
In the plot, Thing-Fish has been deformed by the government's biochemical warfare against gays and minorities as part of the right-wing plan to cry "divine retribution" (à la Frank's theory about how Republicans started AIDS via religious missionaries' vaccinating of overseas primitives). The resulting "fear of God" helps value-preaching conservatives get elected, and also allows them to return favors to religious groups and televangelists who've donated campaign funds (cf. "Heavenly Bank Account" on You Are What You Is).
"Of all of Frank Zappa's discography, Thing-Fish must be his most controversial, misunderstood, overlooked album. Obviously, it is not a masterpiece, but reducing it to a compilation album with a racist plot distorts the reality. First released as a three-LP set (and reissued on two CDs), this album is the 'original cast recording' of a never-produced Broadway show. Working-class joes have been mutated into potato-headed, duck-mouthed creatures by a government experiment gone wrong. They put up a Broadway musical in which reality and fiction become one for two members of the audience. The main character, Thing-Fish, is played by Ike Willis. His thick caricatured Negro accent is directly taken from Amos 'n' Andy's King Fish character. Zappa's intention was not to mock African Americans, but to ridicule the way they are depicted on Broadway, mainly a white male-dominated milieu. Harry and Rhonda, the two audience members drawn into the story by force, are played by Terry Bozzio and Dale Bozzio. Harry will realize he is gay, Rhonda will turn into a briefcase fetishist. Zappa exaggerates the yuppie trends of the mid-'80s (Harry is gay for 'career purposes'; Rhonda embodies the ultra-feminist) and slips into the plot concerns about the spread of AIDS being the result of governmental scientific experiments. It's crazy, offensive, barely holding together, but it sure is entertaining. To accommodate the plot, Zappa wrote a couple of new songs and re-recorded a handful of tracks from Zoot Allures, You Are What You Is, Tinsel-Town Rebellion, and Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch with new lyrics. It is definitely for the seasoned fan (the conceptual continuity clues make an integral part of the experience), but more than rehashed material."
"We at STAGECRAFT ENTERTAINMENT have worked for four years to actually bring this project to the stage. The only 'musical' Frank Zappa has ever written has been something we just had to do. It started out as an idea way back in 1999, when Tommi was listening to the studio recording of 'Thing-Fish', the 'original cast recording'. It was a recording put together from already existing material and newly recorded studio material. This piece in it's entirety has never been perfomed on stage, it has never been performed as a theatrical production. It took a year until Tommi and his little crew received permission from Gail Zappa (the late composers wife and head of the Zappa Family Trust) to perform two scenes. Having tasted blood, the 'triumvirate' Daniel Knapp, Wolf E. Rahlfs and Tommi Brem moved the project forward, until they received permission to perform their own adaptation in a London theatre. 'An authorized adaptation of Frank Zappa's Thing-Fish' opened the Opera Season at the Battersea Arts Centre. The help of an international cast and crew of 32, a handful of sponsors and the private bank accounts of Knapp, Rahlfs and Brem made this production happen. Four sold out shows and an international audience as well as extensive media coverage made up for the effort and the money spent."
