Comic strip hits the stage in 'The Rosenbach Company'

"Helloooo?"

The voice is gravelly. Croaky. Sounds like the man on the phone has just woken up. But no, that's the way Ben Katchor - artist, writer, librettist - normally speaks. The creator of the comic strips "The Jew of New York" and "Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer," both of which helped him win a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award," is bringing his most recent stage work to the Leventhal-Sidman JCC in Newton for two shows this weekend.

"The Rosenbach Company" is his pop musical collaboration with composer and singer Mark Mulcahy, detailing the lives of Abe and Philip Rosenbach, brothers who dealt in rare books and antiques in Philadelphia during the first half of the 20th century.

Katchor was commissioned by the Rosenbach Museum to create a piece to celebrate the museum's 50th anniversary.

"That was because among the many things he collected, Abe Rosenbach collected illustrated books, and I think they thought I would do something as a book or a comic strip," he says. "But I had done some music theater before this event happened, and I said I thought it would be more of an interesting public spectacle to do a piece of theater, because their lives were very theatrical. So they let Mark and I produce this sort of opera based on the lives of the two brothers."

The resulting show is a unique piece of theater, a combination of an opera with a pop sensibility and a picture book. The actor-singers remain in fixed positions in front of a large screen that features large-scale projections of Katchor's original watercolors, some of which are animated, all of which help to propel the story. At certain points in the show, the focus is on the singers; at other points it's on the projection.

Katchor mentions that both "The Rosenbach Company" is part of an old tradition.

"It goes back to before the invention of printing," he says. "You have the picture reciter or the ballad singer who would hang a large painted banner with images telling some topical story - like about a local murder. He would set up in the street and sing to an audience that gathered around him. This started in India, and then spread all over the world. The show is somewhat in that tradition, but a little more theatrical."

So is it an opera or, as the show's publicity material claims, a pop musical?

Katchor quietly groans at the question, then slowly says, "These terms are all kind of vague. We think of opera as Italian high opera, and then there's light operatic Gilbert and Sullivan, and then that evolved into the American musical. But I guess when a show is completely sung, it's less like a musical and more like an opera. And this one is all sung.

"But it's pop music," he adds. "Mark's music is a very specific kind of American music. I'd say it's accessible popular music."

Katchor and Mulcahy met more than a decade ago when a mutual friend brought Katchor to hear him sing in a club.

"When music theater became something I was interested in doing, I thought Mark was somebody who could set human speech to music. A lot of his songs had this very natural use of text and speech."

Their first collaboration was "The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island," which was based on one of Katchor's comic strips. When the new commission came Katchor's way, he again gave Mulcahy a call. Katchor directs the show, and Mulcahy sings in it.

Katchor describes it as a comic tragedy about a young boy who grows up in Philadelphia "and somehow becomes infected by a love and desire to have old, rare books."

Abe becomes an expert on the subject, and then an advisor to wealthy local collectors. It's then that his older brother Philip, who sells antiques, suggests that Abe turn his book hobby into a business.

"The situation is that one person doesn't have the knowledge of how to make money from these antiquities, and the other one has the knowledge but isn't particularly interested in business," explains Katchor. "So one literally feeds off the other. Abe Rosenbach made all the money for this company, while Philip attempted to deal in antiques, but he wasn't very successful."

Again he points out, "This is all sung."

And ever-improving.

Originally produced through the auspices of the Rosenbach Museum in 2004, the show has been presented at venues all over the country.

"It's tweaked constantly," says Katchor, who directs every production. "That's the one thing that makes live theater different than movies. It's not just a canned thing that stays the way it is. You can make it better. We see it and hear it so many times, we keep thinking we can make little improvements. And we have. We've edited things. It gets a little tighter. That's the ideal way to do this. Every time it's remounted, you should be able to rethink it."