Old become ‘Young’ again

Lenny Fontaine, 87, gets fired up about a lot of things. One of them is peanut butter. He’s a real “aficionado,” he tells the handful of people clustered around him in a posh D.C. hotel room.

Lately, he’s been receiving large quantities of the rich spread as gifts, including a six-jar sampler pack from the acclaimed Greenwich Village outpost Peanut Butter & Co. It’s just one of the rewards of being a movie star.

Mr. Fontaine appears in director Stephen Walker’s new documentary, “Young@Heart,” opening April 18. The film follows an unorthodox senior citizens’ chorus (of which our peanut butter fiend is a member) for six weeks leading up to a big performance.

Mr. Walker, a British helmer who has directed films for BBC and Channel 4, recalls first hearing about Northampton, Mass.’s own Young@Heart Chorus in London, where he lives. He was surrounded by newspapers in his kitchen on a Saturday morning when Sally George, his wife and “Young@Heart’s” future producer, came in and said she’d purchased tickets to see a group of elderly Americans perform rock ’n’ roll songs.

His initial reaction was, “Is this going to be a gimmick? Is this like karaoke? What the [heck] is it?” But he says he kept an open mind and ended up being “amazed” by what he saw: 70-, 80- and 90-year-olds performing unique, spirited renditions of songs like Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” and the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” that took on whole new, ironic meanings.

An idea for a “rock opera about old age” was born.

Mr. Walker’s finished product is a touching, uplifting and at times quite sad glimpse into the lives of older Americans who are using the outlet of art to preserve their vitality. These brave performers have something to say about the worth, potential and charm of the elderly — and what better place to do so than in a climate and country in which old age is something to be feared?

The chorus would not have been possible without the efforts of its director Bob Cilman, a man frequently referred to as the Young@Heart “taskmaster.” He sort of fell into the job between 1982 and 1983.

“I was working in all kinds of arts projects in town going nowhere quickly,” he says. “I was working in a theater company, working in a band called the Self-Righteous Brothers, and I was a projectionist at a movie theater, so I got to do all kinds of fun stuff, but none of them paid a lot of money and certainly none of them had health insurance.”

Mr. Cilman got an offer to run a meal site for the elderly, a position that came with benefits. He took it. Soon after, a woman approached him and said she played piano and wondered if he might help put together a group.

“Thirty people showed up,” Mr. Cilman says. “Since then, it’s expanded so that the radius of where the group comes from is about 40 miles,” and the chorus’ travels frequently take them even farther away — like to Europe, one of the staples of their touring.

No, Mr. Cilman says, it’s not competitive to get into Young@Heart, but there are certain criteria. Members have to be at least 73 and “need to be able to focus on creating art,” not just being a soloist showing off his or her vocal talent.

Also, there’s a certain look. “There are a lot of old people who look so young that they don’t really fit with this group,” says Mr. Cilman. “We’re sort of the opposite of the AARP model, which is to take older people and make them look young. You look at the cover of their magazine and you go, ’That’s not an old person.’ ”

With Young@Heart, says Mr. Cilman, “the older the better, and I think that’s a good thing because America really hides it. When our elderly magazines hide it, you know something’s not right here.”

It makes sense, then, when Mr. Fontaine says, “I never thought of myself as a movie star.”

“It’s something that you dream about in the back of your head,” says fellow chorus member John Larareo, 76. “But you don’t realize it’s going to come true sometime. We’re enjoying it as much as we can.”