The end is near: why does the land of plenty love dystopias?

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim

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PROPHETIC WORKS always promise more than they can deliver. Fans of the Book of Isaiah still wait in vain for lambs, goats, and unicorns to make the dust fat with their fatness. And when was the last time anybody who really deserved it had his heart vexed, his blood poured over mountains and rivers, and his flesh fed to fowls and beasts, as promised by the prophet Ezekiel? More recent prophecies haven't worked out much better: The actual year 2001 sucked so hard that the estate of Stanley Kubrick should face a class-action suit for false advertising.

But the late Frank Zappa's Joe's Garage now rises to that rare stratosphere of works applauded for their prescience when the future itself arrives. The mad, filthy 1979 rock opera (a hybrid of a cheap high school play and a say-no-to-music cautionary tale narrated by a creepy government official) has now been brought for the first time to the live stage, in a very faithful musical playing at Los Angeles' Open Fist Theatre.

In Entertainment Today, reviewer Travis Michael Holder marveled at "how right that wildly un-PC social critic ... Frank Zappa was in his pronouncement of what could be the future of America, a place where his outrageously predicted fascist theocracy, not to mention the Central Scrutinizer itself, have become all too real." The Los Angeles Times' Philip Brandes allowed that "the rock icon/ avant garde composer/social satirist's cautions seem downright prophetic." L.A. Weekly's Steven Leigh Morris added, "Some people can just see things coming."

Such claims for Zappa's prophetic gifts are commonplace. In a YouTube comment on the musician's epic six-minute tirade "Flakes," Bob Cronley wrote: "I believe the original record came out in 1980, and it was sheer prophicy (sic). Frank warned us, but very few listened. Now, the Flakes are running our government, running our corporations, and programming our computers. This is the most important protest song ever, but it's too late, we are doomed for not listening.:)"

Pat Towne and Michael Franco's production of Joe's Garage is an inspired, moving, hilarious adaptation of a concept album that Rolling Stone's Carter-era review said would be impossible to stage. As far as I know it's the first fully successful effort to bring rock's manic, shameless anarchy to legitimate theater.

But was Frank Zappa's three-decade-old record really prophetic?

Oh, it has its eerie overlaps with our science-fiction present. The album's...