During a recent lunch rush at The Station House Café, Dale Polissar sat eating a cobb salad and washing it down with a cold Anchor Steam. “I don’t usually have a beer in the afternoon,” he said, but today he’s feeling relaxed. Yesterday was different story: his van had two flat tires and he had to direct a new piano player through the entirety of his upcoming musical, “Plutocracy,” opening on Friday, Oct. 21 at the Bolinas Community Center.
In a bag beside his table is an orange folder that holds all the production notes for the semi-staged concert musical, which follows an unexpected hippie heir to a giant oil company. The folder is worn and crinkled, with a small butterfly-shaped doodle by his partner, painter Judy Molyneux, and contains a how-to manual for adapting the melodies that Mr. Polissar composes while walking on the beach into a musical about power and money, fathers and sons.
Born and raised in San Francisco, Mr. Polissar has lived in the Bay Area for most of his life, minus a stint working in a lead smelter in Idaho. He said he recalls picking up the clarinet during grade school after being drawn to its “shiny keys.” As a teenager he wrote music and penned protest songs, and he always enjoyed musicals. “It was natural for me to gravitate to that way of expressing my beliefs,” he said. “I always try to make it entertaining and fun—not preachy.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree in English and then a master’s in composing from Stanford. He said he was a few classes shy of obtaining a doctorate in music when he heeded the counter-culture call to tune in and drop out—perhaps a little too literarally. He left Stanford in 1969 (“atonal music was fashionable and I’m essentially melody and harmony,” he said of the program) and busked on the streets of San Francisco for a few years before landing in Bolinas in 1973, in search of a beautiful landscape and a community.
On top of being a composer and clarinetist, Mr. Polissar is a poet. His 2009 self-published collection “Breaking Free” includes is a poem he wrote after his first year in West Marin. In “Bolinas, 1974,” he expounds upon the warmth he felt in the community: “Their joy of living strong/ And they do glory in the multiplicity/ Of ways that people can be/ And when they come together/ My Lord how they can dance/ And give each other pleasure!”
In 1986, Mr. Polissar wrote and debuted his first musical, the Ronald Reagan-inspired “Talkin’ to the President!” Two decades later, during the George W. Bush years, he penned “By George, It’s War!” “Bad presidents inspire shows for me,” he said. Although “Plutocracy” does not focus on a president, the musical is steeped in political satire. “The central problem is that government is run by money and I knew I wanted to write about that,” he said.
“Plutocracy” imagines what happens when the head of a global oil corporation dies and, to everyone’s surprise, leaves control of the company to his young hippie son, David. The antagonist, the boy’s uncle, pines for control and has no regard for the planet as resources dry up and pipelines are secured.
Mr. Polissar said the 1972 Peter O’Toole drama “The Ruling Class” helped conceptualize the plot, but that the strongest influence was his love of the planet. “I think it’s such an incredible miracle we’re on this earth and I’d like to see us survive!” he said.
The show’s poster has the protagonist flinging a music note-shaped stone at a Goliath-like monster depicting greed. (Donald Trump’s face was used to model the poster’s villain but Mr. Polissar said the Republican nominee’s connection to the musical stops there.) Though power and money are the major themes in the show, fatherhood comes up, too. “It’s rare to be a man who feels he got enough support from his father,” Mr. Polissar said. “My father supported me financially, but most men don’t feel close to their fathers.”
San Francisco resident Tim Mayer worked with Mr. Polissar on “By George, It’s War” and has one of the lead parts in “Plutocracy.” “When Dale calls, I come running,” he said. “The guy can write music. There’s a different quality of song; he’s a melody writer. All the songs have a message and I’m always excited to see what it is.” He’s been rehearsing since August with a four other actors who’ll together play 13 characters, and says he’d love to have a theater company pick it up and do the show as a full-scale musical.
For now, Mr. Polissar is content reshaping the little songs he hears by the beach in the town he loves into conceptual narrations. “A community like Bolinas, and West Marin in general, makes it possible to go on and do your art without fame or success,” he said. “There’s a fellowship.”
“Plutocracy” will debut on Friday, Oct. 21 at the Bolinas Community Center at 8 p.m. It shows on Sunday, Oct. 23 at 7:30 p.m. at the Dance Palace Community and Cultural Center. Tickets for each are $20.