William Inge | Picnic / 2023

a utopian revisioning of a small-town american dystopia

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Inge Picnic, directed by John Farmanesh-Bocca; the production I saw was at The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, Los Angeles, April 2, 2023

 

It may be odd, but certainly is predictable, that gay playwright William Inge spent most of his life writing about heterosexual relationships in small town America, particularly from the viewpoint of women. In the 1950s when Inge was at his best, few stage dramas and no movie could discuss homosexuality

      All of his figures suffer instead the mid-twentieth century American angst about class, identity, and sex while outwardly supporting and sustaining the very forces which are the causes of their inner suffering. In Picnic the females include an elderly woman, Helen Potts (Rosemary Thomas in the current stage production), whose long-ago marriage was nullified by her dominating mother for whom she is still caring, and whose sexual life, in effect, has been terminated at an early age. It is no wonder that throughout the play she is fearless about inviting young men to “tromp” through her house and is the most encouraging character in the play for sexual encounters, particular with handsome outsiders.          Her next-door neighbor Flo Owens (Yolanda Snowball), on the other hand, has been in love and raised two daughters, but has been seriously hurt and damaged by her husband’s extramarital affairs which ended with his leaving her; it is inevitable perhaps that she seeks a seemingly “model” husband for her beautiful but not intellectually talented daughter, Madge (Mattie Harris Lowe in the production I saw), who, despite Flo’s moral scruples, she almost pushes to become more sexually involved so that the boy, Alan Seymour (Ahkei Togun), son of the wealthiest man in town, will quickly marry her before her beauty fades as she feels her own has, helping to cause the breakup of her marriage.

     The boarder in her house, the school teacher Rosemary Sydney (Sydney A. Mason) is perhaps the best example of this small-town hypocrisy. As a teacher she pretends to keep the highest of moral standards, but as a woman she is desperate in her middle-age to find a husband and willing to do nearly anything to push even the man she doesn’t truly love, Howard Bevans (Derrick Parker), into marriage. She is the most openly conflicted person in the play, attacking those who drink while secretly imbibing and enjoying it, even to the point of becoming rather drunk at the picnic. She makes a desperate pass at a younger man who, when he rejects her blatant sexual advances, attacks him as a sexual degenerate the moment after she has ripped off his shirt, accidently on purpose so that she might get one last glimpse of his rippling abs. She is desperate and sad in the pulls her society has demanded of her, displaying a horrific schizophrenia of church-going spinster and a sexually needy woman.

     Flo’s younger daughter Millie (Symphony Canady), an intelligent, curious young good-looking teenager who is beginning to realize that it is time for her to begin wearing dresses and dating young men, is equally confused by her tomboyish behavior, her dislike of all the young boys in her town, and her longings to leave and become a writer like the woman whose book, The Ballad of the Sad Café, she she currently reading, Carson McCullers. Inge codes this young girl as a future lesbian without needing to say a word about her sexual proclivities of which even she is still unaware.

       And finally, there is Madge, the most beautiful girl in town, a not terribly bright woman who, nonetheless, is tired of being merely the subject of the male gaze, and auditioning for the role of a future trophy wife that has no meaning other than through her physical appearance. She goes along with the path chosen for her by her own mother and the community at large, winning beauty contests such as the Neewollah Queen (Halloween spelled backwards, an interesting commentary about all of these Labor Day events), and making herself pretty, but is exhausted in seeking who she herself might truly be, while at the same time representing the essence of an insider, beloved by all. 

    None of these women is happy, but then neither are the men of the community, even if Inge does not bother to explore most of their personalities in depth.

    The local paperboy Bomber (Rogelio Douglas III) would be a lover but hasn’t the looks, brains, nor personality to be anything other than the loud-mouthed challenger he feels compelled to portray.

    Bevans is perhaps the most well-adjusted of all the characters—except for the fact that as a meek business man who has enjoyed the company of Rosemary, he lets himself be bullied into marriage simply to qualm her mid-life desperation.

 

      Even the wealthy young Alan Seymour realizes that no matter how well he achieves he will never be important in his father’s eyes, who likes prizes and contests, the richest man in the world, the best football scorer, the Queen of Neewollah, etc.

      The outsider to this community, and a threat as any stranger has long posed to small, rural cities and towns throughout history, is the most angst-ridden of all. Hal Carter (Monti D. Washington) may have been once known as the best college football player of his day, but he comes from not only what is often described as “the wrong side of the tracks”—which given the barriers of small-town USA, even the Owens’ and Potts’ small, white-framed houses are clearly located compared with the Seymour mansion—but from a dysfunctional family in which the father was alcoholic and his mother involved with another man. He himself was arrested and sent way to reform school for stealing a ride on someone else’s motorcycle. And like Madge, he is not intellectually gifted, having flunked out of college. Only for a few years of fraternity life, when star football players are given permission to share quarters with wealthy frat boys when he met Seymour, has Hal lived in a world of permission, and even then, he was disliked for being a braggart.

 

     Since there Hal has attempted to get a job in Hollywood, worked as a farmhand, and bummed around the country surviving through part-time jobs without ever being able to find something might make him feel the glory he was awarded between the football game goal posts. Hal, in short,  is the all-American boy-man that constitutes so very much of the stereotype of the US male, the prom-King in high school who lives the rest of his life as kind of Willy Loman traveling salesman or serves out his sentence of adulthood as a janitor with a household of four or five children, the only difference being this man has had no high school days and no woman who has wanted him except women like the two he has met along the way, who engage him in sex and steal all his hard-earned wages.

      In short, Inge’s characters are all standard small-town stereotypes of the day. I was going to add the word “small-town white stereotypes” because this playwright’s small Kansas communities are just that, small towns such as those in which Joshua Logan’s movie version of the play was filmed—Hutchinson, Halsted, Nickerson, Salina, and Sterling—white communities where very few blacks existed in the 1950s. Which brings us to the central issue of this particular all-black production, directed by John Farmanesh-Bocca, the son of an exiled Iranian General.

      Let me begin by saying that I always look forward to racial and gender switches in the productions of classic dramatic theater—and directors and actors have felt free to make just such kinds of changes in my own plays (written under the name Kier Peters)—because of the new insights with which they provide us. And certainly, by casting the major character of this play, an outsider football hero who seems always on the run from the police, desperate to arrest him for the very slightest of infractions, a black man gives an entirely new dimension to the character. We can understand, far better than we ever might have comprehended why William Holden can’t keep a job and is hounded out of nearly town he visits, when the character is portrayed by a figure—even more trim and muscularly well-developed than the 1955 shirtless Holden—such as this work’s Monti Washington.

     As a black man his role is no more stereotyped that it was in the original, and it makes far more sense. Indeed, it might have been even more interesting if Hal’s character might have been the only black figure of this production, where the trope of the dangerous “white gaze” upon the beautiful black male might have been truly explored in a manner in which it seldom has been in modern US literature.

      While we know that black individuals suffer all the fears and emotions expressed in this work, in 1953, the date of this play—the same year of the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott, the first major boycott of an urban bus system, and Jackie Robinson, signing with the Dodgers, became the first black player of the Major Leagues—I might suggest that most of the black community’s attentions were not focused on the relatively minor melodramatic sufferings of these characters. While as Farmanesh-Bocca argues, blacks were deeply contributing to the US that became an economic superpower, it is hard to imagine their collection consciousness being focused on the sexual and class faux pas of a handsome outsider and a beautiful insider of their local community. And no small midwestern town that I know of in 1953 had given permission to the range of wealth and acceptance to blacks as we witness in this stage production in the character of Madge’s beau and Hal’s college friend Seymour.

      Yet the actors of this work are all quite wonderful in their roles and totally convincing. And if you can ignore all the historically anachronistic details, this director’s Picnic is just that, a joyful celebration of young love that wins out over all the adult strictures and consternation.

      In an interview with the director with Shari Barrett, Farmanesh-Bocca suggests that he has always felt “on the other side of the glass looking in” upon American culture, and as a kind of tourist to the American experience he has spent much of his career exploring what US culture truly is. He explains that he loved a country that he never felt particularly loved him in return.

     And in that context, we can see this production as a kind of Utopian vision of what US experience should be, a world in which we can explore the mid-50s psyche of blacks much in the same way that the country gave permission to playwrights such as Inge, who despite having his own roots in just such small Kansas towns, because of his sexuality was exploring a world from which he equally stood outside, heterosexual love.

     Finally, from such an expected shift of viewpoint we do indeed suddenly get a new perspective. What if these small rural midwestern towns were made up primarily of blacks? As a friend who joined me at this event commented upon leaving the theater, “It turns out nothing is basically any different.” As the director himself comments: “The play, in the hands of a black cast, rang like a bell. Rather than narrowing the scope of the play, it only expanded the scope of the story of America, inviting us all to celebrate how unique and similar our human experiences are.”

      If Picnic is a play has long seemed dated, in this production it has been given new life and new meaning in its exploration of black identity, love, and class relationships in the heart of the heart of the country that never but should have existed.

 

Los Angeles, April 6, 2023

Richard Strauss and Oscar Wilde | Salome / 2008

a dance of death

by Douglas Messerli

Oscar Wilde (libretto, based on his play), Richard Strauss (composer), Jürgen Flimm (stage director) Barbara Willis Sweete (director) Salome / 2008 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast] 

Howard and I attended the high-definition live performance of Strauss's opera Salome in late 2008; but its appropriateness for inclusion in the 2002 volume became immediately apparent. This opera is, after all, almost an inverted paean to the subjects of love, death, and transfiguration—although no one in this work—except perhaps for the necrophilic Salomé—can be said to be in love or spiritually exalted at its end.     

     Strauss's libretto, based on Oscar Wilde's French play, is almost painful to endure, moreover, because of its characters' confusion of love with lust, death with power, and transfiguration with insanity. Each of its major characters is doomed from the outset by his or her perverse behavior through which each desperately strives to attain something that cannot be given. The Syrian Captain of the Guard, Narraboth, desires the untouchable Salomé, destroying himself when he witnesses her mad acts.

     Herodias, Herod Antipas's niece and the former wife of his brother, Herod Philip, has married her uncle/brother-in-law to the outrage of many in Judea, receiving widespread damnation by Jochanaan (John the Baptist), whom Herod has, accordingly, arrested and imprisoned. The historical Herodias also wanted power and ultimately forced her husband to demand he be named King of the Judea provinces which he controlled; but in Strauss's version she primarily seeks the restoration of her "good name."     

     The historical Herod also sought further power, but in the opera is seen primarily lusting after his sixteen-year-old daughter, willing to promise anything if she will reveal herself in her legendary "Dance of the Seven Veils."    

     Once Salomé has witnessed the man behind the outraged voice in the chambers below the great terrace to where she has escaped from the dinnertime leers of her father, she desires to sexually control the prophet, who emphatically rejects her.

    Jochanaan obviously seeks his freedom, but is even more committed to the damnation and redemption of the entire family. If their desires emanate from the lusts of self and body, his stems from an equally perversely unforgiving faith

     In order that this unhappy family and guests might obtain what they desire, each also gives up something that will end in self-destruction. As I have already reported, Narraboth gives up his life. Herodias sacrifices her own daughter to her husband for the possibility of destroying Jochanaan, and, in so doing, further dooms her "good name." Herod will be forced to give up his protection of the holy man, Jochanaan, resulting in the wrath of the Sanhedrin and his Jewish subjects and perhaps in the loss of his kingdom (in fact, soon after John's and Christ's death, Herod Antipas was banished by Caligula to Gaul). Through her dance, Salomé gives up, symbolically speaking, her chastity, and through her murder of Jochanaan, loses her sanity and ultimately her life (the historical Salome did not die, but was wedded to Herod Philip, her mother's former husband). For his faith, condemnations, and disdain of Salomé Jochanaan sacrifices his head.

     Salome's frenzied dance, accordingly, can be understood as a ghastly dance of death, an abandonment of all things honorable that love, faith, and freedom might represent. It is both a sexual tease and a prelude to the sexual frenzy she later plays out when she is served the head of Jochanaan on a platter. But it is not only Jochanaan's and her own death for which she dances, but for the end of her world, the destruction—so often symbolically sought (and occasionally accomplished) by the younger generation against the old—of her parents and their world.

     The Metropolitan Opera productions on screen are almost as good as being at the opera itself, and the close-up perspective is perhaps even better than witnessing the stage in the cavernous space. In this particular production, however, the censors felt it necessary to save the "home" audiences from witnessing Karita Mattila's breasts. But given the limitations of her dance, performed in what The New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini aptly described as "Dietrichian drag," perhaps we were thoughtfully spared the spectacle. Although Mattila has a lovely face, and is able to vocally and physically convince the audience of her sexual energy, the very size of her body renders her performance to be more like that of an agile ox rather than a lithe teen. And it is hard to imagine Juha Uusitalo's Jochanaan as eliciting Salomé's intoxication with his eyes, lips, and hair. But then suspension of belief is often a requirement of opera productions, and the performances as a whole were riveting, particularly in Kim Begley's Herod and Ildkó Komlósi's Herodias.

     Although the opera really has nothing directly to do with LGBTQ issues, given its almost campy focus on the beautiful Jochanaan, the fact that it was written by Wilde, and the memory of it’s 1922 silent film truly camp version, Salomé, it is difficult to remove this opera version from its gay sexual associations.

Los Angeles, November 16, 2008

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2008).

Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht | Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) / 2010 [filmed theater production]

a lost alabama: mockingbird in reverse

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kurt Weill (composer), Bertolt Brecht (libretto) Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) / 1930 / performed by Teatro Real Madrid in 2010 / I saw this on HD Broadway on April 27-28, 2020

 

Howard and I first saw Kurt Weill’s and Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in the early days of the Washington National Opera, Howard suggests at that city’s Lisner Auditorium, but I believe it was in an early operatic performance at The Kennedy Center. The only WNO production we saw at Lisner, if I remember correctly, was Frederick Delius’s Koanga in 1970, their only performance of that year. Perhaps we saw the Weill/Brecht opera the next year when the Washington National Opera moved over, thanks to Roger L. Stevens, at the new city treasure.

 

     We were young, and probably still innocent enough that I could not fully appreciate its dark, bawdy, and satirical views. Of course, I loved the song “Moon Over Alabama” (David Bowie’s version):

 

Oh, show me the way to the next whiskey bar

Oh, don't ask why, no, don't ask why

 

For we must find the next whiskey bar

Or if we don't find the next whiskey bar

I tell you we must die, I tell you we must die

I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die

 

Oh, moon of Alabama, it's time to say goodbye

We've lost our good old mama

And must have whiskey or you know why

 

     I recall the opera as being more of a kind cabaret event than a true opera. And surely, at times, this Weill-Brecht work does bear more resemblance to The Threepenny Opera than to the “true” operatic repertoire—whatever that might mean.

      Yet, what a delicious discovery over the last two days was the on-line streaming of Teatro Real Madrid’s 2010 production of this work, conducted by the Spanish version of our Venezuelan/Los Angeles hero Gustavo Dudamel, Pablo Heras-Casado (quite brilliantly conducting the Bolshoi Theatre Symphony Orchestra), and whose production was directed by the Catalan-based experimental La Fura dels Baus geniuses Alex Ollé and Carlus Padrissa.

       As the Spanish newspaper’s El País’s J. Á. Vela Del Campo summed it up:

 

“The much-feared new production by Gérard Mortier in the Teatro Real of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny resulted in a success on several levels: vocal, orchestral, choral, theatrical, dramatic. This opera is aboveall an assemblage of different artistic disciplines. In this production

they came together like clockwork, and this time it was Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht who benefited the most."

     Suddenly, in the singing of Jane Henschel (as the evil leather-bound matron of Mahagonny, Leocadia Begbick), Willard White (as her cohort, Trinity Moses), Measha Brueggergosman (as the beloved whore Jenny), and Michael König (as the Alaskan gold-miner Jim MacIntyre, who falls for Jenny hard) I realized what a remarkable opera this truly was.

      I will not, this time around, attempt to relay the silly plot in its entirety. Weill and Brecht confused geography and American dialect enough to make the story so improbable that it is almost impossible to make out why the three central escaping felons have moved up to a desolate northern spot in the South of the country in which they feel safe enough to establish a kind of early Las Vegas-like city, Mahagonny, where liquor, sex, and money rule—let alone explaining why Alaskan miners are drawn to it, along with other slimy businessmen, in this production dressed in suits.

     The only thing that is important is that none of the would-be pleasure-seekers are unhappy where they’ve landed, creating shifting factions in their newly found community, and resulting, eventually in the death of MacIntyre which ends in the sinful city’s fall. Las Vegas’ dimmed neon lights in our current pandemic remind me of that same demise.

     Yet watching this bawdy satire over the last two days, Weill’s remarkable skill as a composer nailed me. I laughed, cried, suffered with the numerous shifts in his score from the late 1920s, and which in its premiere in 1930 resulted in the Nazi’s hatred, and in both Weill’s (in 1933) and Brecht’s (1939) move to the USA, which, along with so many German artists, helped make for their importance in US culture.

 

Los Angeles, April 29, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2020).

 

David Mynne (performer) | A Christmas Carol / 2019

a man of different stories

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Mynne (performer) A Christmas Carol (based on the fiction by Charles Dickens) / directed by Simon Harvey / the performance I attended with Diana Bing Daves McLaughlin and her granddaughter Elcie on December 7, 2019 at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Lovelace Studio Theater in Beverly Hills, California.

 

Cornwell, England performer David Mynne, directed by another Cornwellian, Simon Harvey, performs the Charles Dickens’ Christmas classic A Christmas Carol as a kind of gang of voices, from the sounds of the wind to the chains of his former partner Jacob Marley. In a sense Ebenezer Scrooge, in this performance, becomes, if nothing else, a one-man dynamo, who seems to be everywhere at every moment. This is certainly not the isolated and trying-to-sleep businessman of Edwin L. Marin’s 1938 movie where Reginald Owens plays a miser desperately seeking to escape all human contact. No languid escapism in this version of the work!

      Just for the fact that Mynne himself performs the specters who threaten him throughout the night, we see a far greater vision of the psychologically-driven spirts who haunt him. It reminded me that Marley and he had been students together at the awful Dickensian boarding-school they both attended, and that the older “partner” had taken the younger under his wing, so to speak. I’ve always been interested in that strange male bonding, which, by accident, I discovered another fictional telling about two days later in The New York Times Book Review, a review of Jon Clinch’s new novel Marley which more carefully explores their relationship.

       Obviously in Dickens’ work there is no homosexual or even homoerotic connection between the two, but, as Clinch writes, “The adolescent Marley immediately establishes a viselike hold over the newly arrived Scrooge,” and you do have to wonder how Scrooge in his early days so interned himself as an accountant—a role Bob Cratchit later plays to the miserly Scrooge—to a secretive man who may have been working in his business dealings in the slave trade—so Clinch suggests—who, when Scrooge discovers the fact, attempts to redeem the company to which he is attached. But ultimately, it is the “frightening and dangerously attractive” Clinch (as critic Simon Callow describes him) who, through his love of Scrooge’s sister Fan, is redeemed while Scrooge becomes the greater monster.

     This fictional version of events, obviously, is not completely there in Mynne’s wonderful performance; yet there is something even stranger about his sudden attraction to Crotchit’s dying son, Tiny Tim, who he sits upon his shoulder as a hand glove, in such an intimate action that it almost suggests an act of pedophilia.

      I looked to my friend Diana Bing Daves McLaughlin’s grandchild Elcie to see how she was reacting to all of this, but realized her crawling into and up above her seat that she was probably simply enjoying the crazy puppet-like actions, as if Mynne’s shoulder sock might be just another version of Sesame Street.

      Yet Mynne’s lively production was not so tame as that children’s series. Even as he buys a giant turkey to feed Cratchit’s brood, there is something transactional about his actions. The family is well-fed, but we cannot quite comprehend how they will survive in the future, even as Scrooge now delightedly attends the Christmas dance party of his nephew.

      If he has found a new life in his very sudden conversion, we recognize him still as the same man of whoosing winds and horrors he has collected through his life. The leaves seem to pile up, created through his own voice, even as he attests a new joy in the Christmas season.

      Given he is a single tornado of voices, we can never be sure in this version who Scrooge really is. He has, in a sense, become his own past, Marley, the Spirit of Christmas’ past, and the horror of possible Christmas’ future all in the single spirit of one failed human being. And we never know when one of those myriad voices will again turn on the human race to express “Bah Humbug.”

       If Marley is locked-up in chains of his own terrible actions of the past, this Scrooge’s life is equally compelled by the man different stories he tells of his own existence.

       A “slave trade” is truly what Dickens’ work is all about, the trading of human flesh (or at least a giant turkey) for one’s own pleasure and servitude. Bob Cratchit must eventually return to work and Tiny Tim will ultimately be removed from the arm which has brought him back to life.

      Having lost his youthful sister, his dearly beloved partner, and his lover Belle, Scrooge will never truly be one of the ordinary people who surround him. Bitterness will surely sadly creep into his life once again. In this production, moreover, Mynne plays all the fragile figures and even the landscape of a world of capitalist greed, where all the tiny figures of money made and lost gets toted up. After all, money buys a large turkey for Christmas dinner; poverty buys an occasional small goose.

 

Los Angeles, December 9, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (December 2019).

Aretha Franklin / 1942-2018

a diva of the people

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aretha Franklin (1942-2018)

 

Finally, after months of trash news (not fake news, just “trash” news) about our abusive President, (and on the same day where hundreds of newspapers spoke out about the President’s attack of “the enemy of the people”) we were allowed several hours of peace on the media by a true royalty of USA culture, sharing the presence of Aretha Franklin, who died today at the age of 76; she might have been a slightly older sister, and, in a sense, she was, since I heard her voice through much of the years in which I was finally coming of age.

      I say this with a wince of pain since growing up in the 1950s and 1960s I was an aloof young man, who loved Broadway musicals and classical works, but disdained most popular music. And when I went onto college, I studied classical music, singing in some of the major choral groups of the University of Wisconsin, not listening much to the popular greats of that era. 

      Of course, I heard a lot of popular music; I worked in a local restaurant, whose stereo components were trained exclusively to songs from the Beatles and other radio regulars; but I tried not to listen—although, of course, I did listen, while trying to feel those songs were all beneath me. It’s an embarrassing confession, but I was an elitist, and often still am today.

      Yet many of those songs, even when I refused to fully listen to them, did penetrate my eardrums, and I did grow up with them, and assimilated them, and (secretly, and darkly inwardly) was influenced by them, as were my peers.

 

      And when I heard, a few days ago, that Aretha Franklin was desperately ill with pancreatic cancer, I listened again to some of her most popular songs, particularly her reprisal of her great “Being a Natural Woman,” her lovely rendition of the Simon and Garfunkel classic “Like a Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” the wonderful Sam Cooke number “A Change Is Gonna Come,” and her great Otis Redding standard, “Respect.” Suddenly, I deeply recalled these works, and tears rose to my eyes. Perhaps I did not entirely miss out about popular music in my youth, and, more importantly, I was now so moved by these songs that I was startled by the powerful voice of the “diva Queen.” When she sang about “respect” she didn’t just mean that she was demanding it from her lover, but, as a black woman, from the entire nation. When she sang about that “troubled bridge” she meant it as a bridge between gender and race. Her “change” was prophetic desire. The natural woman she was went far beyond the enjoyment of male sexuality. Yes, I had been there, I now remembered. These songs were part of my own memories.

      Born in March 1942 in Memphis, Franklin was the daughter of a minister, C. L. Franklin, who, eventually in Detroit, founded the New Bethel Baptist Church, where she sang in the chorus, he advising her, as she later reported, how to more closely interpret her songs. She was a natural talent, her father predicting that eventually she would perform for “Kings and Queens,” which she actually did later in her life. She even performed before a Pope, when Lucio Pavarotti was ill, replacing him in Philadelphia to sing an English-language version of “Nessum Dorma” with just a few days of practice. She later reprieved that role at a broadcast of the Grammy Awards—singing it just a few hours after Pavarotti called in the report he could not attend—literally saving the show. Well, she was a diva after all.

      I don’t want this piece, written on the day of her death, to be a list of her musical accomplishments. They’re mostly available on YouTube and other musical sources, including her numerous recordings. Yesterday, on Facebook, I posted some of them.

      Rather, I’d like to just like to reiterate what so many have claimed: she had one of the most incredible voices in musical history. Yes, her vocal acrobatics sometimes seemed to be a bit over the top, even a little intrusive upon the golden songs which, as many have reported, simply slipped out of her incredible mouth. But you can also hear in those remarkable arpeggios the whole history of black soul singing, or the religious fervor of Southern black church music, and the amazing scat innovations of previous singers such as Billie Holliday and, most obviously, Ella Fitzgerald. There are, even at seconds, something of Nina Simone’s jazz improvisations in Franklin’s intonations, but perhaps that is too simple, conflating two great but very different singers.

      Aretha Franklin, after all, was a total original, whose songs are so very memorable because they speak only their own language, created in her deep psyche. You can’t truly compare them with others.

      What a relief, I repeat, that for nearly an entire day now (or at least a morning) we can focus on someone who was truly a remarkable figure, who performed with deep expression of caring, and lived a life that so expressed that. As she herself argued: “my most important contribution was in being a good mother,” which apparently, she was; and the people of Detroit seem to confirm she was an early beloved member of their community, a woman who they all seemed to know and to believe in on a very local level.

      Her back-up groups were as much of the picture as she was. And, according to friends, she sought always to feature new, younger artists. Diva she was, but also a friendly force who found it important to be part of the community in which she lived. Moreover, she didn’t like to travel, refusing to take to the air.

      There aren’t many more rustic divas like her anymore. If she often wore fur coats in her performances, she just as often shed them, as she did in her performance of “Natural Woman,” midway during the song at the Kennedy Center performance. Describing her on CNN this morning, Don Lemmon, who had interviewed her and become a friend, openly cried. I too shed tears, realizing what I’d missed.

       Franklin had sung at the inaugurations of Carter, Clinton, and Obama. The smug Trump spoke up today, saying he’d known her well. I doubt it.

 

Los Angeles, August 16, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2018).