Music from John Fleck’s I Got the He-Be-She-Be’s and Other Plays

This is the third in a series of Bachelors Anonymous releases of instrumental music created for the stage (see In a Viennese Vein and Made in L.A. issued earlier). The album consists of music from three soundtracks and a bonus track.

• I Got the He-Be-She-Be’s, the award-winning performance by John Fleck
• Megan Terry’s Home, Zack’s production of Megan Terry’s Home: or, Future Soap
• Suitcase, Zack’s production of the play by Kōbō Abe
• Scheherazade, Rob Berg’s arrangement of a movement from the Rimsky-Korsakov masterwork

I Got the He-Be-She-Be’s

I Got the He-Be-She-Be’s is the original soundtrack of instrumental music for a solo performance of the same name by John Fleck, directed by the late David Schweizer (1950–2024), which debuted at the Wallenboyd Theatre, Los Angeles, on October 24, 1986. It had an extended run through that November and received a 1986 L.A. Weekly Theater Award for Performance in a One-Character Show. It also received the Theater Award for Set Design by Tomata du Plenty (1948–2000). Alas, the awards included no category for music.

The one-act play (John explained it was “the first theater piece I’ve done,” adding, “I’ve always done more performance art—club work.”¹) was described by High Performance co-founder Linda Frye Burnham as “a one-man, two-person, multimedia, postmodern exercise in which the male and female halves of a character try desperately to fall in love with each other.” Hollywood Reporter writer Samir Hachem, writing for the L.A. Weekly, described the action: “Fleck is an intense performer who spins and writhes all over the stage. Jumping on pieces of furniture that suddenly sprout human arms and hands to alternately masturbate him, hold his cigarette ashes [see the album cover image], and beat him up, he is like Pee-wee Herman gone Pasolini.”²

Burnham, continuing: “The script was so nakedly intense that it cut right to the bone . . . the funny bone. Fleck’s enormous performance range allowed him to play both parts while dancing and singing upward of a dozen songs in 3½ octaves. […] The emotional desperation and physical pandemonium were at the same time deeply touching and god-awfully funny.”³

The present soundtrack consists of six numbers: 

1. Heaven
2. Hell
3. Armchair Waltz
4. Honey I’m Home
5. Sex
6. Hell Blues

The soundtrack is available via
HearNow and Bandcamp

Megan Terry’s Home: or, Future Soap

In February 1987 Bachelors Rob Berg and David Hughes contributed the score to Zack’s production of Home or Future Soap by Megan Terry (1932–2023) during his first year in UCLA’s MFA directing program. For a synopsis of the play, see the BachelorBlog post for the track “Salt Doll,” which appears on our album In the Land of Nod.

Zack reprised the play in 1994 at about the time Bachelor David was buying a house (and getting married). And so Bachelor Rob contributed new music and sound design to the production, which was staged that March at San Francisco’s New Performance Gallery.⁴ For this run Zack wrote the following program notes which, due to their relevance thirty years later, are included in their entirety:

Megan Terry’s Home was originally written for television in 1967, a time when many Americans were concerned about the global problems of pollution, population explosion, and the threat of nuclear war. Although these concerns are still with us today, they seem eclipsed in today’s media by “local” problems of trade imbalances, religious wars, urban crime, and ethics in government. Which problems are the most pressing: those that press in on us in our daily lives, or those that require long-term vision and planning? How does a community set its priorities and mobilize the consciousness of its constituents to address massive problems such as world hunger or the AIDS epidemic? We believe that the theater at its best can be one of the tools a community uses to start discussion, influence awareness, and solidify public opinion.


During the 1960s, Megan Terry (along with Sam Shepard, Jean-Claude van Itallie, and others) worked with the Open Theater Playwright’s Workshop, experimenting with dramatic construction and producing plays that were almost universally unclassifiable in terms of existing genres. Yes, Home is a Family Drama, but at the same time it’s a parody; the play’s content and the severity of the issues it addresses are practically at odds with its formal presentation—the empty-headed optimistic platitudes and mundane exchanges of the dialogue, the soap opera conventions, the lighthearted and laughable ignorance of the earth’s future inhabitants. Although Megan Terry is perhaps best known for her transformation and collage-style plays, her skill of weaving form and content together with a deliberate seam of tension is evident even in this collision of The Brady Bunch and George Orwell’s 1984. This depiction of the future forces us to face the question, “Where are we going?”, particularly if present trends continue. With the recent emergence of the first two-year residents from Biosphere II, Home doesn’t seem that far off the mark.


There is also a self-conscious irony in the construction of Home; it uses behavior and conventions derived from television shows precisely to comment on the extent of the influence television may have on future Americans. One of the most intriguing questions for us while working on Home was “How did these people come not only to accept their living conditions, but to embrace and praise them?” Central Control seemed to be the answer: a highly-efficient combination of government, media, and technology that directs the mental energy of all of earth’s inhabitants away from sticky philosophical questions of morality and individual responsibility by holding out promises of solidarity, adaptability, and another galaxy to colonize.


Another major challenge of Home was how to portray the world of the future through specifically theatrical means; that is, without resorting to spectacular technological effects. We decided to concentrate on the soundscape of the future and the physical behavior of those who live there in order to focus on the human aspect of the issues being discussed and the responses to the environment rather than the environment itself. Thus, we leave to the audience’s imagination most of the details that would otherwise be provided were this work· presented through the media of film or video.

The present soundtrack consists of three numbers. Previously released from this same score were “Salt Doll” and “Exercise” as well as the adaptation “Exercise in Revolution.”

7. Appreciation
8. Dreams
9. Morning / Anthem

As “Anthem” soloist we chose Michael Henry, our fellow chorister at St. Philip the Apostle Church, where the three of us first met. Michael’s unblemished tenor is well suited to Terry’s lyric.

Suitcase

In late 1990, Zack asked the Bachelors to produce narration and treatment for the poem included in Suitcase, a play by Kōbō Abe (1924–1993), novelist of The Woman in the Dunes among many other works. Suitcase is a one-act play that often is presented as the first of a trilogy (followed by The Cliff of Time and The Man Who Turned into a Stick), allegorically representing the themes of birth, life, and death.

The play begins with the aforementioned poem, heard offstage, a birthday greeting addressed to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The central plot focuses on the newly married Woman and her unmarried Visitor who are concerned with a mysterious Suitcase, of which Woman has come into possession. The unusual element is that the “suitcase” is actually a character played by a naked man.

The two women attempt to identify the suitcase’s contents (perhaps Woman’s husband’s ancestors) and try to open it/him with a hairpin. As with much of Kōbō Abe’s work, the play is surreal and allegorical. It is often interpreted as exploring themes of hidden identity or the aspect of a man’s personality he hides from his wife, the suppression of one’s creative self when becoming a cog in a machine, and self-discovery or, conversely, the lack thereof. Tension is palpable as Woman considers applying a potent insecticide to article of luggage containing, well…, life or its remnants.

The present soundtrack consists of one number only.

10. Happy Birthday, Mona Lisa

As the poem’s narrator we chose our friend Charles Cameron (1943–2020), an Oxford-educated poet, author, and teacher.

Sinbad’s Shipwreck (From Scheherazade)

Bachelor Rob was inspired to recreate Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite Scheherazade as an electronic piece after he heard Isao Tomita’s The Planets—long after it was released in 1976. He chose the section “The Ship Breaks against a Cliff Surmounted by a Bronze Warrior” because of its propulsive rhythm. He envisioned “Sinbad’s Shipwreck” performed by a dance company but it was not to be, at least not by this release date. Thus this soundtrack consists of one number only.

11. Sinbad’s Shipwreck

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite Scheherazade, Op. 35, is structured in four movements, each with a descriptive title inspired by the tales of One Thousand and One Nights (or The Arabian Nights). The movements are:

1. The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship
2. The Story of the Kalendar Prince (or simply “The Kalandar Prince”)
3. The Young Prince and The Young Princess
4. Festival at Baghdad; The Sea; The Ship Breaks against a Cliff Surmounted by a Bronze Warrior (or sometimes a slightly shorter variation)

The work is unified by two main recurring musical themes: the stern, authoritative theme of the Sultan Shahriar and the gentle, sensuous solo violin theme representing Scheherazade herself. Though the composer originally considered labeling the movements with traditional musical forms like Prelude, Ballade, Adagio, and Finale, he ultimately chose the descriptive titles but insisted that the music was not a precise depiction of any specific tale, but rather an “Oriental narrative of some numerous and varied fairy-tale wonders.”⁵

The Recordings

The original tracks, including vocals, were recorded between 1986 and 1991 at the Bachelors’ home studio, The Men’s Dept, in Pasadena. At the time, Rob played the music on a Yamaha DX7 and David programmed drums on a Roland TR-606. In 2025, Rob recorded additional synth lines using GarageBand at The Men’s Dept in Los Angeles and Denver.

Track List

In a Viennese Vein

1. Heaven
2. Hell
3. Armchair Waltz
4. Honey I’m Home
5. Sex
6. Hell Blues

Megan Terry’s Home

7. Appreciation
8. Dreams
9. Morning / Anthem

Suitcase

10. Happy Birthday, Mona Lisa

Scheherazade

11. Sinbad’s Shipwreck

Credits

All tracks written and arranged by
Rob Berg & David Hughes
except:
• “Anthem,” lyrics by Megan Terry
• “Happy Birthday Mona Lisa,” poem by Kōbō Abe included in Suitcase, from The Man Who Turned into a Stick: Three Related Plays, translated by Donald Keene, Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1975
• “Sinbad’s Shipwreck,” composed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, arranged by Rob Berg

Produced by
Bachelors Anonymous
except:
“Sinbad’s Shipwreck,” produced by Rob Berg

All instruments by Bachelors Anonymous, recorded at
The Men’s Dept (¼” 4-track), Pasadena, 1986–1990
The Men’s Dept (GarageBand), Los Angeles and Denver, 2025
except:
“Sinbad’s Shipwreck,” instruments by Rob Berg, recorded at
The Men’s Dept (¼” 4-track), Pasadena, 1990–1991

Vocals recorded at
The Men’s Dept (¼” 4-track), Pasadena
“Anthem,” 1986; “Happy Birthday Mona Lisa,” 1990

Digital transfers by
Tal Miller
Next Generation Audio, 2020

Mixed by
Bachelors Anonymous
The Men’s Dept, Pasadena, 1986–1991
except
“Armchair Waltz”
Loren Dorland, Mighty Fine Productions, 2025

Mastered by
Scott A. Jennings
Listen 2, 2025

Album cover
Design and layout by David Hughes
Video still taken from a performance October 1986, Wallenboyd Theatre

© ℗ 2025 Berg & Hughes, Celibataire Music (ASCAP)
except:
• “Anthem” published by Samuel French Inc., administered by Concord Theatricals
• “Happy Birthday Mona Lisa” published by University of Tokyo Press

Notes

1. Janice Arkatov, “Two One-Man Shows Put Lives, Fears on Stage,” Los Angeles Times, 21 Nov 1986, VI-2.
2. “Theater Pick of the Week,” L.A. Weekly, 24 Nov–04 Dec 1986, 87
3. “LA Art Grows Up: The Next Generation,” L.A. Weekly, 12–18 Dec 1986, 43.
4. Having recently discovered an audiocassette of these new tracks, the Bachelors hope to include them on a future release.
5. Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, translated by Judah A. Joffe (3rd U.S. edition), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942, 294.