Woodstock’s Stage Left Café to feature Yeats-inspired musical

Joseph Daniel Sobol opened a book of William Butler Yeats poetry years ago as inspiration to write songs.

A guitar in hand, he read the words of the poems.

“They sat on the page like song lyrics,” he said. “I started leafing through the book and picking poems that looked singable and started to sing them. In no time, the music started pouring out.”

What resulted was the award-winning poetic musical “In the Deep Heart’s Core: A Mystic Cabaret” Having appeared on stages nationwide in the 1990s – earning the 1995 Jeff Citation for Outstanding Original Music – the musical is in the midst of another international tour in honor of what would have been Yeats’ 150th birthday June 13.

And it’s coming to Woodstock.

Sobol, along with the musical’s original lead singer, Kathy Cowan, and Irish fiddler Sean Cleland of Chicago, will perform the production from 7 to 9 p.m. June 4 at Stage Left Café, 125 W. Van Buren St., Woodstock. There is no admission price, but donations are encouraged.

The event is part of a Spoken Word series hosted monthly at Stage Left Café by well-known, Emmy award-winning storyteller Jim May of Spring Grove.

“In the Deep Heart’s Core: A Mystic Cabaret” follows the life of Yeats, an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature, as both a musical and theatrical event. It brings together poetry, song, theater, storytelling and music.

“The whole show is pretty much in the voice of Yeats,” said Sobol, a singer, composer, storyteller, writer, folklorist and instrumentalist with a doctorate in performance studies from Northwestern University.

Now the director of the Graduate Program of Storytelling at East Tennessee State University, Sobol also is the author of “The Storytellers’ Journey: an American Revival” and released the solo instrumental CD “Citternalia.”

Citing Yeats as his favorite poet, Sobol first began putting Yeats’ poems to music in 1982.

“It’s very powerful music,” he said. “It was sort of its own world, its own drama. There’s no such thing as a Yeats song in the Best Buy rack.”

Sobol said that unlike other interpretations of the poetry, he changes Yeats’ words as little as possible.

“The poems are so singable the way they are,” he said. “They sing beautifully. Yeats put a great deal of work into making those poems rhythmic and melodic. He had an ear for the music of words, probably greater than almost any poet. To put them to music, to me, is a natural thing. One doesn’t have to improve them.”

Sobol joined the Irish music scene when he moved to Chicago to study at Northwestern University, and in 1994, “In the Deep Hearts Core: A Mystic Cabaret” opened as a musical theater piece.

It ran for eight months at Chicago’s Bailiwick Repertory Theatre and was featured at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., a four-week run at Virginia’s nationally known Barter Theatre and a four-week run at Philadelphia’s Movement Theatre International.