The Gowanus Canal has lived many lives.
Most recently, the 1.8 mile canal is known for its pollution: it was named a Superfund site in 2010, thanks to the oily sheen on its surface and less-than-natural smells that sometimes rise from its waters.
Before it was the subject of federal attention, the canal was rumored to be a favored dumping ground for mafiosos. Before that, it was a critical hub for shipping and industry. And long before that, it was a humble creek where Native Americans farmed and European settlers searched for oysters.
The full history will be recounted through song on Aug. 30, as Wes Braver’s new musical “The Fish Queen of the Gowanus Canal” debuts for two nights only on a floating stage on the surface of the canal.
Braver moved to Gowanus in 2017, and hovered on the edges of the nabe’s thriving arts scene for several years, he said. Then, he got involved with Voice of Gowanus, a local advocacy group.
At the time, Braver was writing songs for a monthly backyard event he hosts in his backyard, the Gowanus Salon. Everything he was learning about the canal started to seep into his songwriting, “kind of like the vapor intrusions that are in buildings near the Gowanus Canal,” he joked.
The end result was “The Fish Queen,” an off-the-wall musical about the past and present of the body as told through sad songs, happy songs, love songs, all performed by the Fish Queen herself.
The musical’s central construct — and character — are heavily influenced by the infamously large amount of human excrement in the canal. An “extremophile” who thrives in intense environments, the Fish Queen is an amalgamation of various marine life all stuck together by, well, poop.
A monstrous and magical creature, the Fish Queen has the memories of every human whose excrement she’s come in contact with through history.
“It’s a dramatical device that allows us to tell this 400 year history, because she remembers all of it,” Braver said. “She has the colonists who first came, the mafiosos who dumped bodies in the canal, she contains all of them.”
Eight different actors — Nico Raimont, Danni Hoshino, Ri Lotz, Julia Melloni, Hanna Bailey Nery, Evan Crommett, and Cameron Giordano — perform as the Fish Queen throughout the musical, as she recounts different people’s memories.
The musical had a lot of material to cover over 400 years of history, Braver said. He and book writer Rebecca Slaman tried to choose the biggest “inflection points” of the story of the canal, like the Lenape natives meeting the first European settlers, the canal being made from a creek into a canal, and the night cops kicked Irish tenants out of the tenements around the canal.
Those moments reflect the current circumstances of the canal, Braver said. With the Superfund cleanup partway done, it’s much cleaner than it used to be — but still has a long way to go. The 2021 rezoning is totally changing the topography of the neighborhood and adding to fears of displacement of artists and locals.
The composer hesitated to give away too many details about the show’s whacky constructs. The Fish Queen does have a physical form, he said, but didn’t elaborate on whether she was a puppet, a costume, or something else.
The all-original songs will likely ring true to locals and Gowanus Canal enthusiasts, with titles like “The System Works (But You’re Just Not Good Enough,)” “What the F Are You Doing on the G Train?” A love song, “Down Apocalyptic,” is a sort of play on “toxic love, toxic obsession,” Braver said.
Braver put the show on for the very first time this summer. In the audience that night was Brad Vogel, a former captain of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club. Vogel fell in love with the show, and “championed” a larger production.
“I laughed out loud, but I also felt shivers down my spine when I first saw the show a few weeks ago in a backyard,” Vogel said in a statement. “I knew we had to experience this on the waters of the Gowanus.”
On Aug. 30 and 31, Braver, Vogel, co-producers Allison Skopec and Joseph Alexiou, and the Dredgers are hosting two nights of performances on a floating barge near the canoe club’s headquarters. Some audience members will be watching from canoes drifting on the surface of the canal.
The show was originally supposed to be one-night-only, on Aug. 30, but sold out so quickly they added a second performance.
Braver said it felt “incredible” to perform the show on the Gowanus Canal. The Dredgers and other local groups have “real hope” that the canal’s future will be better than its past, but that achieving that will require a lot of support from the community.
“I do hope this gets done in a theater someday, but to me, this is what it’s all about,” Braver said. “You’ll smell it in the air a little bit … it’s just a great place to show it off, and the themes are right there on display.
“The Fish Queen of the Gowanus Canal” will be performed at 7 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 30 and Saturday, Aug. 31 at the Gowanus Dredgers Boathouse, 2 19th St. near Home Depot in Gowanus. Tickets start at $28.52.