Polygraph Lounge harmonizes eras of music

February 14, 2005|Globe Staff

Polygraph Lounge is like a lot of things. Rob Schwimmer and Mark Stewart, the two merry minstrels of the ensemble, cite Victor Borge, Tom Lehrer, Firesign Theatre, and the immortally anarchic '40s bandleader Spike Jones among their influences. They might as well have added Johann Sebastian Bach, who put two popular songs into counterpoint and entered them into his ''Goldberg" Variations.

But nothing today is much like Polygraph Lounge, and nothing like Polygraph Lounge would have been possible earlier, because its work depends on more than 250 years of music since Bach's day, and on modern electronics -- not only electronic instruments, but the electronic world that all of us inhabit, in which the music of the world can fill the air at a touch of a button, and everything we have heard can be simultaneously present in our memory and imagination.

Schwimmer plays keyboards and theremin, the wailing progenitor of all modern electronic instruments; Stewart plays electric and acoustic guitars. Both have big hair and favor polyester Hawaiian shirts -- Stewart's shirts had wood-paneled station wagons. Both sing, and sing well, and both play other instruments, like the Stylophone (a Mattel toy of the 1970s), or instruments of their own devising (like a trio of slide whistles, played by a single blower, or the Daxophon, fashioned from plastic household plumbing).

Their show lasts two nonstop, high-energy hours, and there's no way to know what's going to happen next. Like Borge, for example, they tour with a soprano. Melissa Fathman sings a duet for soprano and mezzo from Delibes's opera ''Lakme" made famous by a television commercial; because there is no mezzo, she sings in close harmony with Schwimmer's theremin. She offers ''Goldfinger," with moves even Shirley Bassey never thought of, and after the slide whistles have approximated the ''Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy" from Tchaikovsky's ''Nutcracker," Fathman bursts into the ''Waltz of the Flowers," with double-entendre lyrics a lot gamier than the ones Fred Waring brought to the airwaves back in the days of network radio, accompanying herself on the Vietnamese DanMo.