‘Sisters of Mercy’: The forgotten Leonard Cohen jukebox musical that premiered in Ontario
The idea of building a stage musical around the already popular songs and stories of one pop star or band didn’t really emerge until the 1970s, and it arguably didn’t prove its commercial worth until the 2000s, when Mamma Mia! (ABBA), We Will Rock You (Queen), and Jersey Boys (The Four Seasons) led a total revolution in the genre.
One of the earliest and largely forgotten attempts at pulling off this type of production, however, came way back in 1973, from a highly unlikely source: the not-so-jukeboxy balladeer Leonard Cohen.
Though he only had three studio albums under his belt at this point in his career, Cohen was already an iconic figure in certain Bohemian artistic circles, with his erotic novels and poetry collections achieving an equal cult status to his music among some devotees. He was nearly 40 years old, but was entering the belated prime of his stardom, which inspired his manager, Marty Machat, to look for new ways to capitalise on his client’s success without having to depend on the direct involvement of the elusive artist himself.
The answer, strangely enough, was one of the very first jukebox musicals, a small-scale production that premiered in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, during the 1973 Shaw Festival, generating a fair amount of local buzz if not an overwhelming amount of international fanfare. The show, titled Sisters of Mercy: A Musical Journey into the Words of Leonard Cohen, was adapted from a combination of songbook selections, poems, journal entries, and prose, while a respected New York theatre veteran, Gene Lesser, wrote and directed the play, focusing on a consistent Cohen theme: the adversarial relationship between men and women.
The singer wasn’t involved in the musical directly, but he did decide to show up for rehearsals ahead of its premiere, telling the local paper, The Standard, that it was a “pure indulgence”.
“I’ve seen a rehearsal or two, and I loved it,” Cohen continued, “Nothing prevents me from saying how much I love it. It’s really beautiful”.
The play, which included cast performances of the title track, as well as classics like ‘Suzanne’ and ‘So Long, Marianne’, was at least amusing enough to earn a second run in New York later that year, at the Theatre de Lys. A New York Times critic deemed it a waste of time, however, and an “ego trip”, which is a reasonable accusation to throw at a lot of semi-biographical jukebox musicals these days; maybe the world just wasn’t ready for this format yet.
In any case, Sisters of Mercy seems to have largely faded into obscurity over the subsequent 50 years, despite Cohen’s place in the songwriters’ pantheon and the dramatic increase in demand for this sort of indulgent rock opera. It’s hard to know how he would have felt about a revival of the play in his later years, but in his late 30s, he seemed pleased with its central messages.
“The scene between man and woman today has really become ugly,” he said at a press conference before the play’s debut, “Nobody has really seemed to be able to work it out. There is no harmony. There is a tremendous amount of pain and confusion. Unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on the throne.”
