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Loving the alien: Hudson pop culture purveyor Gary Sohmers does it again with ‘Beasties’

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Loving the alien: Hudson pop culture purveyor Gary Sohmers does it again with ‘Beasties’

“Beasties: A Sci-Fi Rock Opera” is a musical wake-up call for the unsuspected weary masses of America who take Mother Earth for granted.

Think “The Day the Earth Stood Still” meets “Hair” with a little Pete Townshend rock ‘n’ roll bombast thrown in for good measure.

“Beasties: A Sci-Fi Rock Opera” will have its world premiere, live on stage, Oct. 10 and Oct. 11 at the Regent Theatre in Arlington. Doors open at 6 p.m. Oct. 10, with the show at 7 p.m., while doors open at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 11, with show at 7:30 p.m.

Rock ‘n’ roll fantasy

Ageless hippie Gary Sohmers is the writer, lyricist, creator and producer of “Beasties: A Sci-Fi Rock Opera.”

Turns out, Sohmers — an appraisal expert of pop culture, collectibles and toys for 13 years on “The Antique Roadshow” and entrepreneur of the legendary Wex Rex, formerly in Hudson (where he lives) — is also a frustrated rock star.

“Back in the ‘70s, I wanted to be a singer-songwriter like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger. And I just thought that would be great but no one supported me,” Sohmers said. “I was a booking agent for groups like Styx and Cheap Trick and REO Speedwagon. I helped build them up but I was always being the schlepper, the booking agent, the promoter, everything but the performer.”

Sohmers formed a band called Windjammer in Madison, Wisconsin, which included an unknown but talented musician Butch Vig, who would go on to produce Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and become the drummer of Garbage.

In 1979, Windjammer released an album on Upstart Records. Several of the songs in “Beasties: A Sci-Fi Rock Opera,” including “Good Old Friend,” “Dinosaur Rock” and “Knock It All Down” were written back in his Madison days, Sohmer said.

In the ‘90s, when he was producing big pop culture and memorabilia shows at the Bay Side Expo, Sohmers put another band together, called Mindjammer, which recorded some songs in Leon Russell’s old studio bus parked in a driveway in Hudson. These sessions produced “Even the Cool Succumb,” which also made its way into “Beasties: A Sci-Fi Rock Opera.”

Then, something happened eight years ago that put Sohmers in the pit of utter despair and the swinging pendulum of creativity. And, from that unlikely juxtaposition the “Beasties” was born.

Sohmers recalled a feeling of depression and disbelief following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. “So one week, before Trump’s inauguration, this whole story came to me and, within one week, I wrote all the rest of the songs,” Sohmers said. “I put them all together in order. I wrote the three books. I wrote the entire stage play, what they call a look book. And then went back to bed.”

A crowd-pleasing beast

Performed in two acts with an intermission, “Beasties: A Sci-Fi Rock Opera” is made up of infectious showstoppers aplenty and the dream cast boasts more talent than you can shake a limbo stick or divining rod at.

Featuring two Boston music scene living legends (Barrence Whitfield of Barrence Whitfield & The Savages and Mach Bell (who sang with Thundertrain, The Joe Perry Project and the Mach Bell Experience), two soon to be music and stage legends (Liz Proteau and Nadia Gemma), a versatile theater veteran (Jerry Bisantz), a hotshot music director and Clark University grad (Bill Holloman Jr.), a Worcester music institution (Cliff Goodwin) and two recent Berklee College of Music grads (Robb Simring of Sturbridge and Dan Drohan of Framingham, on bass and drums, respectively), “Beasties: A Sci-Fi Rock Opera” has all the makings of being the next crowd-pleasing beast of off Broadway and beyond.

The studio cast-recording album was orchestrated, arranged and co-written by Bill Holloman Sr. (who has played with Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon and Nile Rodgers, just for starters) and mixed by Grammy-nominated engineer Paul David Hager (who engineered Miley Cyrus’ smash album “Endless Summer Vacation”).

Darren Lussier, the owner of Image Production Services in Shrewsbury, also serves as an assistant producer and providing the shows technical services.

“You are going to see a concert with enhancements. The enhancement that you are going to see are some visuals. You’re going to see some animation,” Sohmers said about the stage show. “It supposed to be a live, sci-fi graphic novel. There’re the words. You’re seeing it. You’re hearing it. There are visuals and projections to set moods. This is just the first step.”

‘He’s singing the way that I wish I could sing’

In “Beasties,” Whitfield plays “Voice,” the biggest rock star of the world who is doing a big show in NYC’s Central Park, while Bell plays a retired, washed-up rocker named Grā, who once had a taste of the big time but has been reduced to working as a roadie.

“When I was planning to do this, the most important person was Barrence,” Sohmers said. “There is only person who can sing the way I hear it, that I know of, and that’s Barrence. We’ve been friends for 40 years, and he’s me. He’s singing the way that I wish I could sing. When I write stuff, I hear Barrence’s voice singing it. A lot of stuff I wrote is in a place that Barrence could sing it.”

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Just as the curtain rises and Voice comes out to sing to millions of people, Grā suddenly get inhabited by “Impulse,” an alien entity from another universe whose mission is to shed light on the misdeeds that humanity has been doing to the earth.

Bell has double duties of playing two distinct characters, literally, from two different words. And, in the end, he pulls it off as a rock star, Sohmers said.

Bisantz — who played Don Quixote in “The Man of La Mancha” at the Regent Theater and just directed an original play he wrote called “Children of the Streets” — plays “Dick T.Raitor,” an evil politician who bullies his way into this rock concert and tries to rob the spotlight.

“People will think I am playing someone we all know.  But, I’m going to give it my own spin,” Bisantz said. “Every blowhard I’ve met, every fast-talking jerk with no morals or ethics who just cares about success and money is basically what I’m representing. So I didn’t have much trouble getting into that character and finding the dark side.”

Proteau stars as “Terra.”

“Terra is a lot like Mother Earth. She has that Mother Nature appeal, but she’s a human … The thing I like about Terra the most is that all her lines are very universal and it’s about the bigger picture,” Proteau said. Because Grā (possessed by Impulse) is from a different place and he’s trying to find Mother Earth, when he sees me, he thinks I’m Mother Earth. So he starts to fall in love with me, while ‘Voice’ already knows me because we’re from the same world.”

“Liz sang on the record and I couldn’t do this without Liz,” Sohmers said. “Her voice is so unique and powerful and beautiful and she made the songs her own.”

“My character is very much Mother Nature, Mother Earth,” says Gemma, who plays “Rasta Mom.” “She seems to be very much like an optimist, from the songs that I have been singing. She seems to have this very strong sense of hope, despite all of the chaos around her, which makes sense because the earth survives cataclysmic events all the time and is reborn again.”

‘It doesn’t get better than that’

Holloman Jr. has nothing but praise for the show’s cast.

“Barrence is great. Mach is great. Liz is great. Jerry is great. He recommended Nadia for Rasta Mom, which is a phenomenal recommendation,” Holloman Jr. insisted. “She came in prepared. She knew her part. Her look is right. Her sound is right. She’s phenomenal. And Cliff is phenomenal. It doesn’t get better than that.”

Whitfield compares “Beasties: A Sci-Fi Rock Opera” to the Who’s groundbreaking rock operas, “Tommy” and “Quadrophenia,” while Bisantz compared it to the lesser-known, Pete Townshend rock opera, “Psychoderelict.”

“You can say it’s sci-fi but this is about the human race, about human beings, about feelings, love, hate, whatever,” Whitfield said. “I think it’s something that people usually enjoy and grasp for it. They want to hear something that they can walk away from and says the truth.”

 “It’s an extremely optimistic musical, which is wonderful today to see something optimistic,” Bisantz said. “As for the various forms of music, we have everything from Reggae to hardcore punk, from pretty love songs to musical theater numbers. People are going to fully enjoy it. It’s an immersive rock experience.”

Bell compares “Beasties: A Sci-Fi Rock Opera” to the first musical he saw live onstage, “Hair.”

 “When I analyze music that I have to perform onstage I’m saying can I bring people to their feet with this music? Will this make people feel something? Will it put a smile on their face? Will it make them want to stand up and cheer? And song after song after song in ‘Beasties’ has the potential for that. It’s just showstopper after barnburner after encore after encore. It had a story but the music transcended the story. It was just one killer piece of music after another. That’s what I hear. With the right people behind it performing we can lift the roof off of the theater.”

While there’s a lot of positive energy in the show, Bell said “Beasties” are the insecurity and irrational emotions that live inside us.

“In the production, I suffer from a bad beastie called self-doubt that it has held me back in my life,” Bell said. “When I was singing with The Joe Perry Project, I was rocking out and touring but there was a part of me that wanted to be Dick Van Dyke in ‘Mary Poppins,’ dancing on the rooftop and singing. But because of the self-doubt in me, I never raised my hand to be in a show when I was a kid. It takes a long time to battle these Beasties but, damn it, here I am.”

Holloman calls “Beasties: A Sci-Fi Rock Opera” an all-out (and readily accessible) stage spectacle.

“The good part of this show is that, lyrically, it’s very easy to empathize with. It talks about feelings and emotions that a lot of people don’t necessarily talk about everyday which is good,” Holloman Jr. said. “It has some fun moments. And then it has some moments that are overtly political. ‘Beasties’ will appeal to the musical theater nerd but it’s also a rock show.”

Whether “Beasties: A Sci-Fi Rock Opera” becomes the toast of Broadway or people throw rotten tomatoes at him, Sohmers said he’s very happy he got it to the stage and that the story is relevant and its message is hopeful.

“Climate change is going to be a problem forever. And corruption in politics is going to be a problem forever,: Sohmers said. “So people will be always talking about both those things. So in my mind it will always be universal.”

‘Beasties: A Sci-Fi Rock Opera‘

When: 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 10 and 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 11. Doors open an hour prior.

Where: Regent Theatre, 7 Medford St., Arlington

How much $24-$89 visit beastiesrockopera.com for more information. Tickets available on Eventbrite.

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