Rags Parkland Sings the Songs of the Future is a science fiction concert folk musical with lyrics, music, and book by Andrew R. Butler. After exhibiting an early solo iteration of the show in 2010, Butler further developed Rags Parkland which had its premiere off-Broadway in 2018 at Ars Nova, running for about a month. The premiere production starred Butler, Stacey Sargeant, Jessie Linden, Debbie Christine Tjong, Tony Jarvis, and Rick Burkhardt. Set in the mid-2200s in a world where partially constructed and fully constructed humans face government persecution, the show begins with the title character performing solo before being joined onstage in flashback by his former band, Beaux Weathers & The Future. Butler spent nearly a decade developing a show about a folk singer performing several centuries in the future, pulling inspiration from a variety of folk, country, rock, and blues rock artists. Rags Parkland was well received by critics and garnered a combined total of 21 Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, Drama League, and Henry Hewes award nominations, ultimately winning the Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical. An original cast recording was released in 2020 and a remount of the show was planned for the 2022–23 theater season but was later cancelled when funders left the project.
Plot In 2252, a lone folk singer named Rags Parkland performs at the Over/Under, his friend Gill's subterranean Richmond, Virginia, club ("Apocalypse in Tennessee"). Between songs, Parkland reminisces about his time during a stint in a penal colony on Mars and his romance with his former bandmate, Beaux Weathers ("Android Love Song", "Talkin' Mars Dust Blues", "Stella Charlemagne"). Parkland's songs are largely covers of songs by his old band, Beaux Weathers & The Future, and during one song ("One Hundred Years of Subterranean Society Blues"), the scene shifts back to 2241 when the full band is performing that same song at the Over/Under. Parkland, Weathers, and rest of The Future reveal a world through their performance in which partially constructed and fully constructed humans are illegal ("Never Find Us Now" through "Apple in the Sky"). All members of The Future except for Parkland are, to varying degrees, constructed, yet continue to play music underground as a way to pass along their shared history and hope. During one song ("Love You Good"), a perimeter warning light alerts the club that a raid is taking place. In defiance of the ban on constructed humans, Weathers and the rest of The Future play on against the raid, effectively giving themselves up, while Parkland shrinks back ("The Raid"). The scene shifts forward to Parkland and Gill in 2252 once again. They reveal that Weathers and the rest of the band have not been seen since that day and Parkland indicates that he intends to keep sharing their songs and spreading their story ("Delilah in the Rubble").
Cast and characters
Songs Adapted from the cast recording's liner notes.
Writing In 2009, Andrew R. Butler was reading science fiction classics when he encountered the Philip K. Dick short story "What'll We Do with Ragland Park?", whose title character was a folk singer. While Butler was not drawn to the story itself, the idea of an American folk singer performing several centuries in the future appealed to him, suggesting "a show that had the shape of a concert, but that told a much wider story." Developing this concept, he described an interest in characters in the future "thinking about history, and some of that is our present and some of that is our past, and that character can also be thinking about the future, which immediately changes our temporal framework in a way that is exciting." Butler envisioned the world of the 23rd century as one in which significant political turmoil had come as a result of climate change and resource depletion. The combination of science fiction and folk music, known as filk, had existed as a genre for decades although Butler noted that while he was unaware of it while writing Rags Parkland, he "never imagined that nobody had done this before". When he was working on the musical he "started poking around, just trying to do some research and get [his] bearings and [he] discovered" filk. Rags Parkland was one of several off-Broadway shows produced in late 2018 to combine science fiction and folk music, others including 1969: The Second Man at New York Theatre Workshop and The Outer Space at Joe's Pub. At first, Butler wrote songs for the Rags Parkland character, whose name alludes to the titular character of Dick's short story. He conceived the show as a solo musical based on what he was able to do as a performer, namely singing and playing guitar. Butler pulled musical influence from Odetta, Skip James, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan for Parkland's character, ultimately reverse-engineering the musical's story from the songs he had written. When Butler began writing songs for the character Beaux Weathers and the band The Future, his musical influences expanded to include the more complex arrangements of Alabama Shakes, Jason Isbell, and Fleetwood Mac. Butler's collaborators composed their own instrumentations from the starting point of Butler's vocal and guitar arrangements.
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