Book, Music and Lyrics: Joel Goodman
There is no figure in the tech industry who has ever achieved the highs and lows as Steve Jobs. At the time of his death from cancer in 2011, he had led Apple, the company he started with cofounder Steve Wozniak in his parents’ garage in 1976, to become one of the largest companies on the planet.
But his relationship with people, with his family, and even with the company he founded (which then sacked him, before bringing him back by buying the competitor he was running) was always tumultuous. That life has been heavily documented, in one authorised biography (later adapted into a film by Aaron Sorkin) and several unauthorised ones. Last year, San Francisco Opera debuted The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs to limited success. Each of those works was lengthy, suggesting that condensing the notoriously mercurial iconoclast’s life into an hour-long musical might be a struggle.
That’s a challenge that Joel Goodman faces head-on, giving us a mostly linear tale narrated by Jobs himself in the form of actor Stephen Smith, who performs solo save for four early-era iMac computers whose screens’ Keynote slides and video clips form the musical’s set. (One iMac has screen distortions and does not play video correctly – not, as one might assume, a commentary on the state of Apple in the years since Jobs’ death, but a testament to how tricky it is to get old computers repaired on a fringe budget.)
Goodman starts by examining Jobs’s conflicted feelings arising from his adoption as a baby. The twin emotions, of being abandoned by his birth mother but chosen by his adoptive parents, help to establish a character who struggled to accept his own place in the world, until finding peace and enlightenment (through a combination of experimenting with LSD and practising Zen Buddhism) helped to clarify his resolve.
But on the route to becoming a businessman, Jobs’s character flaws are not unexplored. The greatest of these was the denial of his daughter, Lisa, for whom he refused to pay any support despite his growing wealth. To add insult to injury, Jobs named the next iteration of Apple’s computer line “the Lisa”. Coincidence, an act of pettiness, or an attempt to humanise the burgeoning personal computer market? Goodman suggests that there may have been elements of all three at play.
Particularly in the early parts of the musical, the signposts of how Jobs’s early experiences would shape his adult life are clearly marked, mainly by many elements being repeated both in Smith’s monologues within the book and within the lyrics of each song. That means that there is less time available in which to cover Jobs’s later years, at which point the musical becomes more of a timeline of Wikipedia facts than an emotional musical. Why did Apple hire PepsiCo CEO John Sculley? What caused him to oust Jobs from the company he founded? What triggered the events that caused him to return? Save for a burst of anger at his ejection, Smith gives us little to go on.
Jobs’s return allows for a little variety in Goodman’s music, as the moment is greeted with splashes of a classic Vaudeville style. But beyond that, we get little in the way of Jobs, and more a summary of Apple. The iPod – not the first digital music player, but the most successful and transformative – gets a starring role, the stage’s iMacs helping us relive Apple’s ad campaigns of dancing silhouettes with distinctive white headphones. So too, the release of the initial iPhone, announced in a landmark presentation by Jobs in 2007, is foregrounded. But we see next to nothing of the man leading the transformation of Apple in those moments, of what in his personality would have led to those products.
As Jobs’s cancer diagnosis takes hold, there might also be the opportunity to call back to his beliefs, the confidence in his own abilities and his extreme vegan diet, all of which initially led him to reject conventional treatments for his cancer when first diagnosed. That would help to give a more rounded impression, a musical about a man rather than an obstinate figurehead.
Earlier in the musical, Goodman’s book relates a story of how Jobs’s father teaches his son about the virtues of attention to detail; how, when painting a fence, to take care of the bits that nobody will see. It serves as an illustration of the aesthetic quality control for which Apple has become subsequently known. But it feels like Apple of My Eye could, perhaps, learn the same lesson. Jobs’s life at Apple may be the focus of this flawed, but otherwise intriguing, musical; but the bits we don’t see could do with more attention.
Reviewed on 30 July 2024
Camden Fringe runs until 25 August 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Flawed, but intriguing
