Forest for the trees

Colin Meloy is a self-professed musical theater heretic.
The bespectacled frontman of The Decemberists told National Public Radio’s Terry Gross that he dabbled in The Music Man with a geekboy fandom in high school and there’s even his unreleased musical floating about the nether-regions of Portland, Ore.

So it isn’t any wonder that the band’s 2006 Japanese folk opus The Crane’s Wife was transformed into a prog-rock-meets-Broadway masturbatory fantasy on the band's most recent tour.

The Carson Ellis-inspired theater curtain looked like an indie-drenched interpretation of Swan Lake with a fairy tale scene of frogs and sunkissed princes. Combined with the paper-thin Japanese lampshades that hung above the performer’s heads, the Decemberists stage layout was almost a baroque-rock summer formal.

“It’s the third show of twlight in the Fearful Forest tour 2007,” Meloy said in his trademark literary blowhard prose as he tossed bookish meat to the crowd.