April 9, 2008

Time revises every taste and closes every gap. To observe the Young@Heart Chorus, a fluctuating group of about two dozen singers whose average age is 80, perform “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees in Stephen Walker’s documentary “Young@Heart” is to be uplifted, if slightly unsettled. 

Sung by people approaching the end of their lives, the song is no longer about strutting through the urban jungle with your elbows out; it is a blunt survival anthem. These singers, most of them well-rehearsed amateurs, refuse to go gently into that good night. For them music is oxygen.

When they perform punk classics like “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash or “I Wanna Be Sedated” by the Ramones, the notion of a generation gap begins to crumble. Apart from the rebellious attitude behind the songs’ creation, these are elementary meat-and-potatoes tunes: “Sing Along With Mitch” material but with a hip credential.

The Clash song is a lusty group cheer, which, interpreted by people of advanced age, could be taken as a stubborn assertion of choosing life over death. “I Wanna Be Sedated,” an extremely catchy song any way you look at it, comes across as an ironic refusal to follow a doctor’s orders and lie back in a medicated haze. Members who suffer from chronic multiple ailments are shown struggling out of sickbeds to attend rehearsals. 

At moments the movie, made for British television, risks being a cloying, rose-colored study of happy old folks at play, and the cheer sounds forced. But the lives of the several members it examines at some depth are too real and complicated to resemble a commercial starring Wilford Brimley as a Norman Rockwell grandpa. The movie offers an encouraging vision of old age in which the depression commonly associated with decrepitude is held at bay by music making, camaraderie and a sense of humor. 

Since its beginnings as a collective arts project in 1982 at a center for the elderly in Northampton, Mass., the chorus has developed into a popular local ensemble with an international reputation. It has made 12 tours of Australia, Europe and Canada and serenaded Norwegian royalty. Accompanying the singers is a solid core of professional rock musicians who help ground their sometimes wavering voices. 

Sandwiched into the movie are several surreal music videos made by the film’s producer, Sally George. The wittiest, created around “Road to Nowhere” by Talking Heads, depicts singers happily stranded on the side of an American highway. 

The movie concentrates on the rigorous two-month preparations for a 2006 concert at the Academy Theater in Northampton. Guided by the chorus’s demanding longtime director, Bob Cilman, the members are learning new material, including “Yes We Can Can,” the Allen Toussaint hit for the Pointer Sisters, whose lyrics repeat “can” 71 times in intricate, staccato patterns; Sonic Youth’s enigmatic, equally demanding “Schizophrenia”; and the Coldplay ballad “Fix You.” 

The fact that the chorus’s members are willing to tackle such daunting material attests to the spirit of adventure that is a crucial spur to their shared bonhomie. More than one member admits that his or her favorite music is classical, opera or show tunes. These rock songs are unfamiliar. Instead of comfortable walks around the block, rehearsals (there are three a week) are demanding hikes over hilly terrain. The challenge only makes it more exciting. 

Late during the making of “Young@Heart” two members of the chorus, Bob Salvini and Joe Benoit, died within a week. Although neither death was a complete surprise, occurring so close together, they come as shock to a group dedicated to living in the present as fully and exuberantly as possible. The upbeat realism of everyone connected with “Young@Heart” might be summarized in six words: Life goes on until it doesn’t.