David Yazbek and Jeffrey Lane | Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown / 2010

no one's home

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Yazbek (music and lyrics), and Jeffrey Lane (book, based on the film by Pedro Almodóvar) Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown / New York, Belasco Theatre, the performance I saw was on November 12, 2010

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, shouted Ben Brantley's review in The New York Times "needs—immediately and intravenously"—Ritalin. The musical "is...a sad casualty of its own wandering mind." Los Angeles Times reviewer Charles McNaulty agreed: "all the frenetic activity — with Sven Ortel’s projections lending Michael Yeargan’s fast-moving sets the hyperactive feeling of a fashion video — can’t conceal the gaping flaws of the show any more than decorative icing can improve a cake made without enough baking soda or eggs." "By midway through the second act," observed the Chicago Tribune, "the audience can no longer track the multicharacter action through chaos suited only for film, and palpably checks out of the entire proceedings."

    Anyone who has become acquainted with my theater writing will know that I have not always been kind to Broadway shows. But by the time I saw this original musical a week later, directed by the admirable Bartlett Scher, I could only wonder what all this critical hostility was about. Perhaps Scher had trimmed away some of his actors' frenetic motions since its opening, or perhaps these critics had simply gone to another play, for both I and the audience with whom I experienced this production thoroughly enjoyed the musical—a far better work, it seems to me, than most other musicals, originals and revivals, currently on Broadway. A woman in the row behind me gleefully admitted that she never reads the critics.

     I presume these critics had all seen Almodóar's film on which the musical was based. McNaulty even attempted to compare the two. Yet it seems strange that having witnessed the campy hysteria of the film, that they might not have expected a fast-moving theater event. Indeed, the whole metaphor of both film and the musical is that everyone, having lost or about to lose their sense of position or place (symbolized by love and home), is dropped into a whirling world of accidentally interrelated events. Accordingly, everyone is on the move: Pepa (Sherie Rene Scott), deserted by her lover Ivan (Brian Stokes Mitchell), wants to rent her penthouse and run off—unless she can convince Ivan to return—going so far as to burn her bed; her sexually active friend, Candela (stunningly performed by Laura Benanti), has fallen in love with terrorist and is desperate for advice and fearful of being arrested; Ivan's ex-wife, Lucia (Patti LuPone), having recently returned from a mental institution, is intent on tracking down Pepa and Ivan for revenge; her and Ivan's son Carlos, eager to leave his mother's troubled household, is intent on finding some new place where he and his fiancée might discover themselves. Add a passing Telephone Repairman and the gossipy/prayerful concierges of Ivan and Pepa and one is certain to create a farcical entanglement of people on the run.

     Only the taxi cab-singing Danny Burstein seems to truly comprehend the world in which he exists; prowling the streets to provide services to Pepa and others, he has stocked his cab with medicine, food, magazines, newspapers and anything else his customers on the move may need. This is clearly a world where no one's home; the idea that constant motion should be reflected on the stage is exceptional. Few other musicals that I can recall—Mahogany and Sweeney Todd being obvious exceptions—have so thoroughly taken to the streets.

     The only stop to all this action is, predictably, a Gilbert and Sullivan like magic elixir, in this case Pepa's Valium-laced gazpacho. And it is in the arms of the sleep it awards them that Carlos and Marisa, Candela and the Telephone Repairman, and the Chief Inspector and his Detective can discover the joys of love and regain a sense of stability and peace.

     The two strong women at the center of this work, Pepa and Lucia, must come to terms with their violent passions—and their accordant commitments to constant motion—by themselves, realizing, in the case of Lucia, that her husband had been "invisible" all along, and perceiving, in Pepa's case, that she suffers from an "overdose of love." Lucia's song, performed in Patti LuPone perfection, is perhaps the most touching of the entire production.

     And that is the real problem with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The singers, the acting, even the sets and costumes, the projections on the wall which some critics found so distracting, are all quite excellent in capturing the sense of this fast-moving, love-forlorn 1980s Madrid. Although David Yazbek's lyrics and music at moments ("Lie to Me," "The Microphone" and "Invisible") rise to the occasion, over all they are simply not fetching and powerful enough to glue this musical into a coherent whole. And without these two central elements of musical theater, no production can long survive.

     For all that, I think Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is an admirable failure, a larger-than-life statement of a culture that has lost its center and identity—clearly a subject that should have great significance for US citizens today.     

 

New York, November 13, 2010

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (November 2010).

Claude Debussy | Nocturnes || Magnus Lindberg | Cello Concerto No. 2 || Béla Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta [Los Angeles Philharmonic, conduced by Esa-Pekka Salonen] / 2013

into the atmosphere

by Douglas Messerli

 

Claude Debussy Nocturnes, Magnus Lindberg Cello Concerto No. 2, Béla Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen / the performance I saw was on October 20, 2013 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall

 

On Sunday, October 20, my companion Howard and I attended a concert at the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall which was part of the ongoing celebration of the Hall’s 10th  anniversary.

     Conducted by the Finnish composer and conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, former music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 17 years from 1992-2009, the works performed were by composers Salonen championed throughout his tenure.

      Beginning with Claude Debussy’s atmospheric tone-poem, composed in response to paintings by the American artist James McNeill Whistler—which together were titled, “Nocturnes.” Debussy’s Nocturnes, in general are characterized by the titles of the work’s three sections, “Nuages” (Clouds), “Fétes” (Festivals), and “Sirénes” (Sirens). Like the slow motion of passing clouds, the first section begins with a solemn and shifting movement of chords, which in the “Festivals” section is transformed into a celebratory, dazzlingly series of rhythms. “Sirens,” which features the sighing-like cries of a woman chorus (in this case the women of Los Angeles Master Chorale, which regularly performs with the LA Philharmonic) reminds one, inevitably, of the rhythmic sea waves combined with the entrancing sounds of mythical temptresses. Indeed, the entire work has a feeling of a fluid temptation of the listener, luring him or her into the work. The Debussy piece, in nearly any well-performed version, is a beautiful composition, but in the hands of Salonen it seemed crisper and a bit more muted than more romantically conceived renditions, permitting us to more clearly hear the tonal interchanges between oboes, English horn, clarinets, bassoons, trumpets, trombones, percussion instruments and, most importantly in this piece, strings.

      Orchestral interchange might also be a key word in describing the world premiere of Salonen’s friend and colleague, Magnus Lindberg’s Cello Concerto No. 2. Although some might describe the work by the contemporary composer as being a bit retrograde in its highly melodic score, it worked quite brilliantly, with its antiphonal relationship between the cello and orchestra, with the other works on the program. Bringing out the august tones of the work, cellist, Anssi Karttunen, who has regularly worked the composer as well as with the conductor, performed with the abbreviated orchestra (with only 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, trumpet, trombone and strings) impeccably unflappable.

      So too might the third and final piece, Béla Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta be described as both atmospheric and, and several points, antiphonal. But here, even more than in the “Festivals” section of Debussy’s work and in certain passages of Lindberg’s composition, the startling rhythms of Bartok’s Hungarian and Bulgarian influenced dances dominate, at moments deliriously rising only to collapse into the calm interchanges of the piano and celesta before all war breaks out again between oppositional strings.

      All of these works seem at moments, quite episodic, even though clearly the Bartok work is encased in near mathematically-created structures. But Salonen’s calm and firm conducting elicits from the various “parts” of these works a stunning sense of a rich unity.

      The substantially-filled hall applauded enthusiastically for several returns of the director and bows of the orchestral players.

 

Los Angeles, October 23, 2013

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (October 2013).

 

Oscar Wilde | The Importance of Being Ernest / 2011

nothing but the truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest / New York, American Airlines Theatre / the production I saw was on May 7, 2011

 

The central pun of Oscar Wilde's perennial comic delight—the homophonic relationship of the name Ernest and the word that characterizes "an intense and serious state of mind"—is at the heart of Wilde's work, for while the lovely women of this play, Gwendolen Fairfax (Jessie Austrian) and Cecily Cardew (Charlotte Parry), both can love only an "Ernest," a man of a serious state of mind, the young men, Algernon Moncrieff (Santino Fontana) and John Worthing (David Furr) immediately prove themselves be utter fakers and liars, both—as Algy defines it—Bunburyists, men who lie to their families about having a relative or friend elsewhere so that they can escape into the city (in Worthing's case) or into the country (in Algy's situation). And the first scene of this play is nothing if not complete evidence of these effete young mens' triviality, each competing with one another with absurd aphorisms and often meaningless bon mots. Jack, we may argue is the more serious of the two, but he is no more reliable in speaking the truth than is his friend Algernon, who besides being unscrupulous is represented as a kind of greedy glutton, particularly when it comes to cucumber sandwiches.

     We find it somewhat hard to believe, accordingly, that Jack/Ernest is so smitten by love of Algy's cousin Gwendolen that is ready to marry her on the spot, that is, until we discover that Gwendolen is just as frivolous, ready to marry him on that same spot because his name, she believes, is Ernest.

     All of this is great fun, but would become tiresome were it not for the existence of Gwendolen's Gorgon-like mother, Lady Bracknell (magnificently performed by Brian Bedford), of whom Worthing notes:

 

                                   I don’t really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am

                                   quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case,

                                   she is a monster, without being a myth, which is

                                   rather unfair…

    A great believer in "natural ignorance," Lady Bracknell is a stolid column of English conventionality, ready to accept Worthing because of his lack of political beliefs, habit of smoking, and apparent wealth, but unable to even fathom a man who has "lost both of his parents"—"To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."—and is absolutely flabbergasted when she is told that he was found in a black leather handbag in Victoria Station!

      Bedford plays this most luscious of monsters absolutely straight, no winks to the audience, no loopy drag-queen flopping of hands, and no change of pitch in voice. Lady Bracknell, in Bedford's shoes, is, if anything, more of a lady than ever, muttering her ridiculous pronunciamientos in a post-menopausal voice that seems made for the role. To watch him at work, although his "acting" is so flawless that one cannot comprehend it as "work," is a true joy, something that for me will be hard to forget, and hopefully something I can remember for the rest of my life.

 

     The remainder of the play, as everyone knows, revolves around a series of hilarious coincidences and more outrageous one-liners than even Henny Youngman might crack in a single night. Wilde's play literally drips with wit.

     As outrageous as it first sounds, Algy's suggestion that women only come to call one another sister "after they have called each other a lot of other things," comes true when, Gwendolen, curious about Jack's/Ernest's house in the country, comes visiting only to find another woman hosting tea. Their bitchy politeness crackles with fiery hate.

     Even Lady Bracknell's pronouncement of Jack's "carelessness" with regard to the loss of his parents is apparently close to the truth, when we discover that Miss Prism (Jayne Houdyshell)—currently Cecily's tutor—once worked for Lady Bracknell's sister whose child she carried away forever in a perambulator one morning, and, confusing it with her romantic manuscript, placed the romance in the perambulator and the child in her large black leather handbag—the act releasing a series of prismatic images of what this class-structured society has wrought.

     The revelation suddenly makes the two men, Algernon and Jack, brothers—which they have spiritually been all along. Jack, who soon after discovers that his birth name was Ernest, can now marry his cousin Gwendolen, as Algy, although he must forfeit the baptismal name of Ernest, will now be permitted to marry the young Cecily. Thus, all the characters can be said to have been incorporated into one large family, where everyone will live happily ever after...if they can remain earnest!

     It is doubtful, however, that in such a world of winding tales and deceit, as this family has suffered, that deep seriousness will be long permitted. As Ernest (formally Jack) admits: "It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth."

 

May 9, 2011, Newark, New Jersey and Los Angeles

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2011).

 

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II / Oklahoma! / 1998 [TV version, shown on US PBS in 2003]

allegiances

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Hunt (film director), Trevor Nunn (stage director), Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics, based on the play by Lynn Riggs), Richard Rodgers (music) Oklahoma!  [Royal National Theatre, London / 1998, a televised version with a slightly different cast presented on US PBS stations in 2003]

 

In the few weeks since I wrote about the film Oklahoma! I watched a version of the British 1998 revival on television. That production, a generally fine one—with particularly good performances by Hugh Jackman and Josefina Gabrielle, but with weaker secondary character actors than the movie and what I felt was uninspired choreography by Susan Stroman (the good territory folks were even more gestural and less exuberant in her version)—basically supported my feelings about the dark elements of this fable.

     Even though the Trevor Nunn production attempted to portray Jud in a more balanced manner, and actor Shuler Hensley succeeded (compared to the film portrayal by Rod Steiger) in making Jud more likeable, the dangerous aspects of the culture he represents remained embedded in his behavior. Indeed, in this production it became even more apparent that Laurey had chosen to go with him to the social because he was a farmer, and, accordingly, someone more familiar than the self-assured cowboy Curley. 

     What the film had not revealed to me quite as clearly as the play was that, upon asking Laurey to marry him, Curley “converts,” so to speak, promising to become a farmer. The two warring factions—farmer and cowman—demand alliances, it appears, almost like the family kinships of Romeo and Juliet. And the musical even more pointedly reveals that Aunt Eller and friends are ready to break the law—or at least, as she puts it, “bends it a little”—in order to speed love on its course.

 

Los Angeles, November 2003

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2003).

Martha Graham and Aaron Copland | Appalachian Spring / 1944, film version 1958

love, guilt, and consolation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martha Graham (choreographer), Aaron Copland (composer), Isamu Noguchi (set design) Appalachian Spring / premiered October 30, 1944 at the Library of Congress Coolidge Auditorium / the version I saw was the 1958 film version, directed and filmed by Peter Glushanok.

 

I have seen the film version of Martha Graham's and Aaron Copland's great collaboration several times, and in 2002 I watched it again, this time taking notes on the associations and feelings the music and dance brought to mind. The reader should understand my comments not as a literal description of the dance's events, but as my immediate interpretations of what I thought I saw. Another viewing might produce yet other such emotions.

      In a sense, the work, which so brilliantly expresses the heartland and seemingly captures the sense of Appalachia, was itself a kind of accident. Commissioned by Graham and the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation to write a work for dance for Graham's company, Copland drew on Shaker songs and the kind of American idiom that he had already expressed so brilliantly in his ballet "Rodeo" of 1942.

     Yet Copland had no idea what to title his piece, and even upon its delivery to Graham it was still titled, according the composer, "Ballet for Martha." It was only as the piece was readied to be performed that Graham christened it, after a few lines in The Bridge by Hart Crane in which Crane describes the "spring" as referring to water instead of a season. Yet, Copland reportedly laughed, everyone applauds me for so aptly expressing the sensibility of Spring in Appalachia.

    Moreover, the original outline of script, described as a kind of gender conflict between men's and women's work, featured not only a Pioneer mother, but an Indian Girl, a Fugitive, and a Citizen. In the end the story was winnowed down to the simple outline published in the preface to the Boosey & Hawkes score:

 

                    A pioneer celebration in spring around a newly-built farmhouse

                    in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the last century. The

                    bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful

                    and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites. An older

                    neighbor suggests sorrow and then the rocky confidence of experience.

                    A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the

                    strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end the couple are

                    left quiet and strong in their new house.

 

It seemed to me that instead of the more European concept of "Love, Death, and Transfiguration," the tenor of Graham and Copland's more innocent and emphatically American fable is "Love, Guilt, and Consolation."

Here are my notes:

Into the yard of a newly built home, wonderfully represented by Isamu Noguchi's open walls with a porch-like structure on which sits a kind of rocking chair shaped like a butter churn, come the figures of the dance, first The Preacher (played in the original by Merce Cunningham and in the film version I saw by Bertram Ross), then the Pioneer Woman (Matt Tumey in the film version), and the Wife (Martha Graham in both the original and, at the age of 62, in the film). Four women (Worshippers) follow, who clap and dance joyfully, frolic, and, at moments, gesture prayer.

     A flute, oboe, and clarinet dominate this early passage, and when the flute reaches its highest note, The Husband (Graham's favorite, Erik Hawkins in the original and Stuart Hodes in the film version) enters, lovingly stroking the side of his new house, as he moves forward in pony-like and proud struts and leaps.

     The couple walk to each and move backwards, seemingly to reveal the history of their love, which is, through their various posturings, made somewhat ambiguous at times, with moments of fear revealed among their steady pleasure in one another.

  Now The Preacher kicks up a kind of ruckus, with the Worshippers following behind him as acolytes reveling in what one might describes as is a kind of spiritual square dance, in which he also leaps, bends, grovels, stands, and lifts.

     The Pioneer Woman comes forward expressing her own sorrows and delights, while the Husband quietly ponders his new life. The Wife turns to win the attention of her Husband, simultaneously demonstrating her own new fears and worries, and yet flirting joyfully with a kind of awkward hesitation.

     At one point she takes up the baby of the Pioneer Woman, kneeling, entreating her husband. Is it a desire for a family or her fear for the responsibilities it will mean, the commitments and sacrifice? Clearly, it is both.

     Although the storyline does not describe it as such, there seems to be also a tension between the two women, almost as if the Husband has previously known the Pioneer Woman and they been somehow involved.

      But now the Preacher comes forward into the center, as the couple join him, turning to stare in opposite directions before they enter the church for the plain but joyous ceremony, which ends in the couple stretching, spinning in joy, leaping in the wonderment of it all. The shaker hymn, "'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free," dominates the spirit of the occasion.

     Here the music changes, the Preacher suddenly becoming agitated, spinning forward almost in a kind of dervish, tearing at the air, renting his hair, damning, cursing, accusing, praying. What is their sin? What horror is he describing to them? Is it an actual or imagined transgression.

     The Pioneer Woman comes forward as if to plead for the Preacher to cease, the Husband standing up, turned away in refusal of the sermon. So the Preacher gradually shifts from his violent gesturing, moving forward in a lighter tone and tune.  The husband embraces the world, returning to his wife, while his wife dances a more agitated dance, focusing on her chair-rocker-milking stool as if she were reevaluating her situation. Again. the Husband returns to her, as they repeat some of their earlier dances of joy, reiterating and repeating their testaments of love while Copland's score returns to "'Tis a gift to be simple," ending in a long bassoon chord.

      The Wife turns from her former fears to a sense of relinquishment, resolution, consolation, as the couple kiss away their fears and embrace. The community moves off, the Preacher wishing them peace as he leaves. Husband and Wife now stand alone in their new domain.

 

Los Angeles, March 3, 2002

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2002).

Aeschylus | Prometheus Bound / 2013

tower of circles

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aeschylus Prometheus Bound (translated into English by Joel Agee) / the production I saw was on the evening of September 3, 2013 at The Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Villa, directed by Travis Preston and performed with the help of the CalArts Center for New Performance

 

Generally attributed to Aeschylus, and the first of what was probably a trilogy (Promethus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Prometheus Firebearer) Prometheus Bound is one of the earliest of Western works for theater and has been highly influential in Western thought since its creation. Yet, it is also a play filled with difficulties, particularly for our own time. Like Wagner’s Norse and German-inspired mythologies, Prometheus Bound is filled with sometimes arcane information and the complexly interlinking relationships between Greek gods and the humans the gods have encountered. For the contemporary English-language playgoer, the play’s intensive reliance on a Greek female chorus who chant out their condemnations, sympathies, and prayers for the great Titan, can sound, at times, almost comical, their shrill, wailing chants spinning out into almost meaningless orisons. And what can a contemporary director do to stimulate an audience who for more than an hour are bombarded by the voice of one being, telling his story, sharing his suffering, and predicting his and other’s futures, while all the time chained at the edge of a desolate cliff? How even to explain Prometheus’ brief encounters with various messengers of Zeus—Hermes, Kratos, Okeanos, and Hephaistos—and the almost inexplicable, stumbling in of Io, who Zeus’ wife Hera has turned into a cow, tormenting her with a magic stinging insects—even though she may later father Prometheus’ eventual savior Heracles? Just as in long stretches of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, in Aeschylus’ work there is often not much going on in terms of action.

 

     And finally, the very fact that this work is only the first of three parts, makes for a sense of this first being a fragmentary episode. Although Prometheus foretells his and also our futures, we can never be certain that he really does have the ability to see what he claims to, and others throughout the work scold him for not simply suffering in quietude to ameliorate the wrath of Zeus.

     But it is just that Prometheus can and does speak, that he refuses silence and denies Zeus’ unfair punishment for helping mankind survive, in particular,  stealing for them the power of fire, that we do care for this Titan, that we comprehend him, as Ralph Waldo Emerson described Prometheus, as “the Jesus of the old mythology”—again reminding us of Wagner’s Brünnhilde, who also was punished for intruding herself upon mankind, and, like Prometheus, was punished to remain in isolation, in her case surrounded by a ring of fire, for a seeming eternity before she is freed. If, at the center of this sometimes static work, lay radical ideas about the fight against tyranny, positing in Prometheus a hero willing to help the human race and ultimately end the reign of the gods, how can a director steer a course to successfully get to that point?

      Fortunately, seasoned director Travis Preston has saved his hero from shouting out his lines from linear rock, raising him to a vertical circularity that equates him more with Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Simultaneously speaking from his towering heights, the Prometheus of this production remains a Titan, while also suggesting a Christ upon the cross. He is, in short, one of us, and something beyond us, willing to suffer the eagles’ daily clawing and swallowing of his liver, in order to deny Zeus any pleasure in his punishment. Within the very stage set (the construction by Efrem Delgadillo, Jr.) we see both a continuity of time, a circle within the larger circle, the smaller bringing our hero through his daily sufferings, and the larger, a circle of community, a symbol of Prometheus’ embracement of the human race.

     The chorus, appropriately, not only speaks to him, but crawls up to join him in their shared sufferings. If there is sometimes something almost comical about their efforts, so too are any mortals’ efforts to communicate with the gods.

      Of course, even this striking visualization of Prometheus’ position would mean nothing if Preston had not found an actor who might be able to live up to the position in which he has put him. Ron Cephas Jones not only has the taut, skin-and-bones body that encapsulates the Titan’s suffering, but his basso voice booms out his thespian skills quite brilliantly—in near perfect opposition for what I previously described as the chorus’ more soprano efforts. Bound for the entire play, unable to move by himself, he nonetheless seems almost in control of the busy choreography (by Mira Kingsley) of the chorus, sometimes wrestling with each, and other times circling in a round dance that might almost remind one of Stravinsky’s pagan ritual in Rite of Spring.

      And finally, the music (by Vinny Golia and Ellen Reid), heavy on percussion, creates through its jazz intonations a sense of tortured coolness that reiterates the extremes of Prometheus’ emotional outpourings.

      If at moments all these elements—direction, acting, choreography, and music—momentarily slide into a kind of repetitiveness or even stasis that might make us fear that the difficulties of this tragic work might have, after all, won out—overall there is enough excitement in this production that the plays’ revelations brilliantly dominate. And even though the work ends, predictably, in utter despair, we can believe that one day the eagle will be shot, the Titan rescued, mankind freed from the caprices of the gods: Prometheus not only unbound but redeemed.

 

Los Angeles, September 4, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2013).