The road to fascism leads through an ashy elbow in this highly imaginative indie-rock musical

The prospect of overnight wealth hasn’t lost its allure these six years after the global financial crisis, when we all should have realized that get rich quick is an empty promise for 99 percent of us. Of course, as Ívar Páll Jónsson’s timely (if somewhat incomplete) musical shows, the prospect of being in the elusive 1 percent drives many of us to make some terrible choices. Despite having an impossible-to-remember title, Revolution in the Elbow of Ragnar Agnarsson Furniture Painter rests on an unforgettable premise: Everything we see takes place inside the body of a schlubby Nordic man in a white mesh tank top. (Projected on the back wall of the theater, Agnarsson shifts listlessly on a couch as we enter the house.) His rotund body substitutes for Earth, and Robert Redford plays the part of God. (Agnarsson has a fondness for Redford’s films, shadows of which flash across his eyes to the wonder of the denizens of his body, like Plato’s allegory of the cave.) As far as heavy-handed allusions are concerned, it’s a rather harsh repudiation of the immense importance with which we endow life on our tiny rock.