Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel changed American culture and influenced a generation.
Now, you can see “The Simon & Garfunkel Story” at National Theatre on Jan. 29-30.
“The bedrock of the whole show is the music,” star Taylor Bloom told WTOP. “We play 29 Simon & Garfunkel songs over the course of the two acts. We have an amazing four-piece band backing us. … That’s the main event: playing Paul Simon & Art Garfunkel’s music in a live setting, reproduced to such a high degree of exactness to how it was produced.”
Bloom performs as Simon, while Benjamin Cooley performs as Garfunkel.
“Ben and I get along famously,” Bloom said. “We’ve worked together since 2018. … There’s no acting in the show. Ben and I tell their story in the third person, but when we start playing the song, that’s when we want to embody them vocally and musically.”
Which songs can we expect to hear from their iconic songbook?
“We kick off with ‘The Sound of Silence,'” Bloom said. “The first big hit that people seem to recognize is ‘I Am a Rock.’ We kick off Act 2 with ‘Mrs. Robinson.’ Of course ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ is on there, Ben does an amazing job with it, ‘The Boxer,’ ‘A Hazy Shade of Winter’ is a really popular one, and ‘Homeward Bound’ is a really popular song.”
The second piece of the show is telling the duo’s story in between the songs.
“We’re telling their story as we go along,” Bloom said. “The music unfolds chronologically and Ben and I are sharing little pieces of information about their lives, where they were at the time when a certain song came out or where they were in their relationship.”
The duo actually met in elementary school in Queens, New York, in 1953.
“We start from the very beginning as a couple of 16-year-olds playing as Tom & Jerry,” Bloom said. “Paul Simon leaves to go to England a few years, then while he’s away, one of the songs he’s written has a meteoric rise in the U.S., so he comes back and he and Art Garfunkel start to record. … The big finale is their [1981] concert in Central Park.”
The third component is the visual presentation behind them on stage.
“There’s this beautiful projection screen behind us that has all of these amazing visuals that depict what’s happening in the world around Simon & Garfunkel,” Bloom said. “They were writing and releasing music at a very dense time in American history. You had Vietnam unfolding, you’ve got the Summer of Love, all these different things happening.”
All these years later, what makes their sound stand out above the rest?
“They had a really unique blend of elements that made their music so appealing,” Bloom said. “The first thing is Paul Simon’s songwriting, he had these beautiful melodies, they’re not overly complicated, but they are unique, then his lyrics are poetic but they’re not inaccessible. … Then you’ve got Art Garfunkel coming in and adding all those harmonies.”
For Bloom, the show is a homecoming, having grown up in Winchester, Virginia.
“I used to tune into WTOP all the time,” Bloom said. “The first Simon & Garfunkel song I ever took note of was ‘America,’ which is in the show. There’s an amazing chord [where] they go to an E chord, which is not in the scale, but it just fits so beautifully.”
Listen to our full conversation here.
