My latest project is Abella!
It’s a rock musical about the Supreme Court of Canada, featuring Rosie Abella, its most interesting and colourful justice. There will be singing and dancing. “It’s madness,” the editor of this magazine told me. I don’t think so.
I’m just going down the path laid out by our entertaining American neighbours. If it’s madness, there’s method in it.
So, what’s up down south that offers inspiration? The Originalist, a play about Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court, described as “a daring new work about passionate people risking heart and soul to defend their version of the truth,” opened in Washington D.C. on March 6 to enthusiastic audiences.
The reviews were generally good, but the play sounds pretty serious and there’s no singing and dancing. I think I can do better.
The one-act “buddy” comic opera Scalia/Ginsburg premieres in July at the prestigious Castleton Festival in Virginia. It sounds promising. “Justice will be sung,” the advertisements announce. Justice Antonin (“Nino”) Scalia’s opening aria begins:
The Justices are blind!
How can they possibly spout this?
The Constitution says absolutely nothing about this . . .
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg later replies:
You are searching in vain for a bright-line solution
To a problem that isn’t so easy to solve,
But the beautiful thing about our Constitution
Is that, like our society, it can evolve.
So, there’s singing, serious singing, lots of it, in Scalia/Ginsburg, but, as far as I can figure out, no dancing.
My favourite depiction of a U.S. Supreme Court justice is Kate McKinnon’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Saturday Night Live. The Washington Post calls McKinnon’s SNL Ginsburg “a trash-talking, dancing machine.” “I’m ready to rumble!” she says. “I gotta push same-sex marriage through before God remembers I’m still alive. The grim reaper, he came for me once, but I punched his lights out, I stole his robe.”
SCOTUS justices have deeply penetrated the American popular consciousness. And they seem to enjoy their fame. All this is a good thing. It shows a national engagement with the institutions of governance, and an attractive affection for irony and creative political satire. Nothing comparable has happened in Canada. A few years ago I wrote a book about the Supreme Court of Canada (Mighty Judgment) intended for a general audience. The premise was that Canadians weren’t sufficiently interested in or aware of their highest court. I thought the book might help fix that. Despite my ebullient publisher branding it “a national bestseller,” tepid sales proved my point — no one is interested in Canada’s Supreme Court.
So, desperate times call for desperate measures. A new approach is necessary. Hence, Abella! I’ve got my eye on someone to write the music. Meanwhile, I’m working on the libretto. I don’t plan to depict Justice Abella as a trash-talking dancing machine à la SNL’s Ginsburg, as tempting as that is. It would be disrespectful, and we Canadians don’t disrespect high-ranking officials, particularly if they have to dress up to do their job. But there’s huge entertainment potential in Abella’s personality and judicial presence, and I’m going to try and make the most of it.
American judicial commentator Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Slate that Abella was a “cross between Celine Dion and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” (There’s Ginsburg again, “The Notorious RBG” as she’s sometimes called.) Peter Herrndorf, president of the National Arts Centre (where I expect Abella! to premiere) has described her as cuddly. Stevie Cameron has portrayed Abella in The Globe and Mail as “a pre-Raphaelite sprite with tumbling hair, an elfin creature in a red dress with red stockings . . .” Michael Valpy wrote, also in The Globe, “She hugs, she bubbles, she laughs, she incandescently smiles. . . .” And she’s not just cuddly and bubbly: she’s also a powerful and articulate intellectual force. Perfect!
In Abella! the curtain opens to show a replica of the Supreme Court courtroom. The bad-to-the-bone band strikes up with a powerful thumping beat. An elfin creature in highly tailored red robes with a slit up the side enters from stage left. She dances flamboyantly, high stepping, to downstage centre. The spotlight falls on her tumbling hair, catches her incandescent smile. The chorus — three women and five men in regular black judicial robes — rock in to the heavy metal beat and take their seats behind the dais, moving to the music. It’s the opening number: “We’re the Highest Court in the Land!”
We’re the highest court in the land,
Canadians, don’t you understand?
Abortion, jail, suicide,
We’re the folks that decide,
Public policy is our gig,
The PM? We don’t give a fig!
We’re the ones that take a stand,
We’re the highest court in the land!
The music softens, a tenor saxophone strikes up a gentle theme, once more the spotlight falls on Abella, the chorus members quietly take their place on the bench suddenly intent on reading factums, Abella starts to sing, plaintively, the song that will go on to become famous, it will become known around the world as “Rosie’s Theme.”
I came from nowhere,
Born in a camp
For displaced persons
Far away, in Germany,
Now, here in Canada
I make the law.
The law is like music,
The music of Mozart
Or Ella Fitzgerald,
Louis Armstrong
Or Billie Holiday,
I am the composer of the law,
I am the singer of the law,
I am the Law Singer.
The members of the chorus stop reading factums, stand, and join in.
She is the Law Singer,
Abella!
You get the idea.
Philip Slayton’s new book, Mayors Gone Bad, was published in May.
{nomultithumb}
