“An Extraordinary Experience To Perform”: Bill Murray And Friends On Their Concert Doc ‘New Worlds: The Cradle Of Civilization’

In the birthplace of Western philosophy, Bill Murray dropped some wisdom on a receptive audience.

“I swear to you,” he told the crowd in Athens, quoting Walt Whitman, “there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.”

Divine things, like the music of Bach, Shostakovich and Ravel, the melodies of Gershwin and Bernstein, the songs of Stephen Foster and Van Morrison.

For one magical evening in 2018, on terrain once walked by Socrates and Plato, Murray was joined by cellist Jan Vogler, violinist Mira Wang, and pianist Vanessa Perez for a concert combining music and poetry. The film New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization captures that performance at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus near the Acropolis, the culmination of a tour that took the quartet to Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, the U.S., and across Europe to their final date in Greece.

The show grew out of a friendship between Murray and Vogler, who originally met on a flight from Berlin to New York. They bonded over a shared appreciation of the arts.

“We hit it off and then we kept crashing into each other and sharing each other’s experiences in music and movies and art and poetry,” Murray explains of their early encounters. “Jan texted me one day, said, ‘Hey, you know, we could do a show. We could travel the whole world.’ I thought, ‘My God, whoever gets a text like that? Whoever gets a message that we could travel the whole world?’ I mean, only a liar says that kind of stuff. But I thought, ‘Holy cow. I’m in for that. That sounds good.’”

The next step was to come up with a program that would knit poetry and prose, recited by Murray, with musical performances by Vogler, Wang, and Perez.

“Jan invited me to his home, where I met Mira Wang, his wife, who’s the violinist, and he laid this big stack of books of American literature on a table,” Murray recalls. “And he and Mira played these pieces, and I just went, ‘What could possibly go wrong? How can I goof this up?’ So, we all just jumped into it, and he brought Vanessa Perez with whom he’d already made a tango record a few years before. And she brought like the spice to the party, a little seasoning, like Venezuelan excitement. And we just started rolling.”

They played more than 30 dates, at venues including the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland, Koerner Hall in Toronto, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and Carnegie Hall in New York.

“The shows, each one of them was an extraordinary experience to perform,” Murray tells Deadline, “and sort of head-shaking after you’d be done because the power of all this material and their playing just kind of knocked people out. They didn’t see it coming. And it was a joy every night we did it and every night the people saw it.”

New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization is rolling out in theaters in cities across the U.S. this month, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Las Vegas and even smaller towns like Eugene, Oregon and Cedar Rapids, Iowa (find ticket and location information here).

Murray not only recites material by James Thurber, Ernest Hemingway, James Fenimore Cooper, Whitman and other authors, but he sings several tunes during the show, including Morrison’s “When Will I Ever Learn to Live in God,” and “The Way It Is” by Bruce Hornsby. No language barrier appeared to impede the audience’s enjoyment.

“You play the first notes of Bruce Hornsby and you hear this audible gasp from the crowd, like ‘Ohmygod, that pretty song, here it comes,’” Murray says. “The world’s a lot smaller than it once was. And even though the planet’s the same size, the voices penetrate. So, we didn’t much concern ourselves [with language differences]. We’d already played in Germany a number of times, and they got us, and we played in Scotland. They don’t speak English. They refuse to speak English.”

A poignant moment comes when Murray and the musicians perform “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” a song composed in 1854 by Stephen Foster. Murray introduces the song by noting the circumstances in which it was written – as a plaintive message to Foster’s estranged wife, whose nickname was Jennie.

“I thought I knew the song ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair’ until I sang all the verses of it,” Murray comments. “It’s bone crushing. It’s not a lilt, it’s not a lullaby, it’s bone crushing and it’s full of pain. And the beauty of the melody makes it possible to bear the pain of the emotion.”

On stage with Murray, Vogler felt the ecstatic reception to moments like those.

“This show particularly really got the audience very excited,” Vogler remembers. “In my musical career, I have been lucky to have some success. But this kind of audience reaction that we got on this show was kind of new to me because it was like a Beatles concert or a Rolling Stones concert. The audience would explode and we would play seven or eight encores, no matter where we were. And Athens was no different.”

This being an evening with Bill Murray, of course there are moments of humor, as when he sings “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story (music by Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim), and “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me),” by Tom Waits. He even dances with Wang at one point, and tosses roses to the crowd, like Dame Edna with her gladiolas.

Director Andrew Muscato had just one shot to film all of it.

“They were only playing one show in Greece,” Muscato says. “We hired an all-Greek crew. The camera operators hadn’t seen the show before. My director of photography was American, but he hadn’t seen the show either. So, you’re kind of experiencing the film for the first time the same way the camera operators are, where they’re, ‘What’s going on over there?’ But I had seen the show a couple of times. I’d seen it at Carnegie Hall. I’d seen it out in Escondido, California, and there was an energy that they brought to the performances that I wanted to capture.”

Muscato adds, “There was also an honesty to the performance as well. Vanessa really wears the performance on her face. You see Jan and Mira get into it. And Bill, there’s this emotion behind what he’s reading. You haven’t seen anything like it before… This ephemeral stage show — God knows if it’s if it’s ever going to happen again – I felt my job was basically almost just be a custodian. If nothing else, let’s capture this very unique experience.”

Vogler credits Murray with an intuitive understanding of how the show needed to be structured and paced.

“We had all the material, we had the music lists, we had the literature and we could pick and choose. And once this was done, we started rehearsing,” Vogler explains. “But then Bill would show up the next morning and say, ‘Hey, Jan, let’s switch this around.’ Or he would say, ‘There’s something missing. We need the musical joke.’ There was a moment in the show where he thought we should go crazy and we should ‘lose it’ for a moment… Bill’s feeling of ‘Okay, the timing here needs something funny, explosive in this moment’ — that came from him, so it was a true collaboration. I would say that everybody contributed in their own beautiful way.”

Murray downplays his own contributions.

“I’m responsible for none of the intelligence you see. None,” he insists. “Flatline. Bill Murray flatlines on Deadline. It’s the truth. I got nuthin’… I mean, we just showed up — I shouldn’t say ‘we,’ but I certainly just sort of showed up and did as I was told, as I was ordered to.”