Gian Carlo Menotti | The Consul / 2017

is there anyone to whom the heart can be explained?

By Douglas Messerli

 

Gian Carlo Menotti (music and libretto) The Consul / Opera Long Beach, performed at the Centinela Valley Center for the Arts, Lawndale, California / I attended matinee with Howard N. Fox on October 22, 2017 

 

For several years now Opera Long Beach has been the most innovative opera company in Southern California and one of the most notable in the US. Recent productions include John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer and I Was Looking at the Ceiling, Philip Glass’ The Perfect American, Akhnaten, and Hydrogen Jukebox, David Lang’s The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, and Duke Ellington’s Queenie Pie, to say nothing of notable revivals of works by Purcell, Stravinsky, Bernstein and Poulenc, along with numerous other works. It is obviously run by an energetic artistic team, led by Austrian-born Andreas Mitisek, who stages many of his own productions in both Long Beach and at the Chicago Opera Theater, which he also directs.

     The fact that Mitisek, himself, is an immigrant (he became a naturalized US citizen as recently as 2015) is particularly relevant in the case of the company’s newest production, The Consul, by Italian born composer Gian Carlo Menotti.

     The decision to produce this opera—originally performed in Philadelphia and, then, on Broadway, in 1950 (it won both the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Music that same year)—is utterly brilliant given the current governmental administration’s emphatic determination to oust thousands of undocumented people from our shores and delimit those who might be legally allowed to enter or shores.

       In the post-World War II Europe millions from all over the globe found themselves in great peril in a time of changing governments, including the Communist take-over of many Eastern European countries, shifting allegiances, along with the simple desperateness of life in countries that had suffered so much loss. Menotti’s tale was spun out of a news item about a 38-year-old immigrant Polish woman, who, when, waiting on Ellis Island, was denied entry by into the country by a special inquiry board, hung herself in a detention room.

       I had previously seen the production only on a DVD-version, produced for television by Jean Dalrymple in 1960 (I missed that broadcast as a child on TV, but had often watched Menotti’s televised productions of Amahl and the Night Visitors, the Christmas-based opera, written a year after, that, over the 1950s and early 60s became an annual television favorite). The 1960 broadcast starred the original Magda Sorel (the opera’s central character), brilliantly performed by Patricia Neway. I watched most of the tape, once again, yesterday evening, after seeing this new presentation at the Centinela Valley Center for Arts in Lawndale (Opera Long Beach is determined to present their productions in a number of local venues).

       As I correctly recalled, the 1960 version, as I described it in a piece I wrote in 2017 upon Menotti’s death, was “a drab, gritty, black-and-white” realist drama. Magda lived in a dreary flat and was daily forced to return to an equally dreary consulate with the hopes that someone might hear her pleas and allow her to immigrate to a foreign land to where, evidently her husband has escaped because of his activities in the local underground. She, clearly, is seeking political asylum in the country which seems impervious to her cries.

      The TV version is highly dramatic in its more direct, one-on-one interchanges between Magda and the Consul Secretary (Regina Sarfaty), and the very drabness of everything seems to reiterate the noir-like aspects of her terribly fated life.   

      Mitisek, in his role as costume designer, his scenic designer, Alan E. Muraoka, and the lighting designer, David Jacques take a different tack, creating a world, as Muraoka describes it, from the perspective of Magda, wherein everything has become a space akin to Kafka’s nightmare landscapes. No wall seems affixed to any other, windows are dangerous things (after all, as the evil Secret Police Agent [Cedric Berry] warns Magda, you can see a great deal through a pane of glass), and the Consulate Secretary’s desk towers like a kind of expressionist tower of babel (or, to put it more succinctly, a “tower of babble”) atop which the Secretary (a marvelously dark, but also vulnerable Audrey Babcock; her later aria “Faces” demonstrates, late in the opera, her guilt in the destruction of these immigrants’ lives), hovers, making it nearly impossible to scale except for few lucky ones.

      The problem is that the Consul Secretary and the “foreigners” with whom she comes in contact speak entirely different languages. As I put it in my earlier review, speaking of Magda’s and her husband’s goodbye duet early in the opera, “This couple’s sorrowful duet of departure, transformed by John Sorel’s mother’s participation into a trio,” presents us with some of the looniest lyrics ever created:

 

     Now, O lips, say goodbye

     The word must be said but the heart must not heed.

      …..

     The rose holds summer in her winter sleep.

     The sea gathers moonlight where ships cannot plough,

     And we will the heart retain endless home…

     …where time does not count, where words cannot reach.

     Let no tears, no love laden tears dim the light that charts our way.

     Leave the tears to the starless one who wanders

            Without compass in the night.

 

“Despite being nearly drowned in metaphors, the audience recognizes that this is the language of believers, of the heroes Sorel and his wife represent. John’s only straightforward advice to Magda is to visit the Consul.”

      But this too is a delusion. The consulate Secretary can only report to the desolate Magda (in this production, the always startling singer/performer Patricia Racette, clothed in a dark blue dress), “Your name is a number, your number a case.” “Please fill out the paperwork, bring me your documents.” Magda’s impassioned pleas—filled with outrageous metaphors—and the efficient business woman in the high tower simply cannot intersect. There is always, day after day after day, another bar to those who wait below, some unable to speak the language at all, others unable to put their powerful fears and desires into the language of the bureaucracy or even normal logic, and still others, such as The Magician (Nathan Granner), believing their remarkable talents alone should permit them entry into the magical world that is continually eluding them. No matter what these folk try to do, they might never meet the impossible requirements that those holding power demand. The Consul, himself, seems never to be within; and when, finally, in Magda’s impassioned plea for humanity which is at the heart of the opera—

 

          To this we’ve come: that men withhold the world from men.

          No ship nor shore for him who drowns at sea.

          No home nor grave for him who dies on land.

          To this we’ve come: that man be born a stranger upon God’s

              earth,

           that he be chosen with a chance for choice,

           that he be hunted without the hope of refuge.

           To this we’ve come, to this we’ve come

 

            …..

           …Oh! The day will come, I know

           when our hearts aflame will burn your paper chains.

           Warn the Consul, Secretary, warn him.

           That day neither ink or seal shall cage our souls.

           That day will come, that day will come!

 

—she is offered an opportunity to speak with the always missing Consul, she observes the terrifying Secret Police Agent leaving his office.

      Having already lost her child and her husband’s supporting Mother (the powerful singer, Victoria Livengood) to death, what does Magda possibly have left? Indeed, the opera might have ended here, at the close of the second act.

      Menotti, however, clearly wants us to suffer through the entire ordeal. Finally, to save her husband (Justin Ryan), Magda determines to enact the vengeance on society which she has long recognized is quite inevitable: her own death. Through that act she hopes to deter her husband from returning home; but, as fate has it, John has already returned and been arrested in the consulate, despite the fact that only there might he have been protected; on every front, however, it is too late.

       In the original production, Magda returned home to put her head into the oven. Here, once again, the artistic team have decided to present the act in much more theatrical terms—and again I cannot but admire them for their choice—to present her death in terms of the event that originally inspired the composer, a suicidal hanging, along with the hanging of nearly all those we’ve previously encountered, played out in the symbolic upending of chairs—the common symbol of home and family life.

      When we think back at how the US failed so many millions of European Jews during World War II—despite the presidency of one of the most liberal of all leaders, Franklin D. Roosevelt; and when we recognize that millions more will no longer now be permitted to enter our country, we can only turn our eyes away from one of our nation’s most potent symbols, The Stature of Liberty with its poetic promise by Emma Lazarus—“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore”—and cry.

      If today Menotti is often thought of as a kind of retarder composer, in league with Puccini and other late Romanticists in a century already musically transformed by Ives, Stravinsky, Berg, Cage, and so many others, perhaps it is time to rethink this mid-century composer’s art, putting them into the context of his own long-time companion Samuel Barber and friends Aaron Copeland and Leonard Bernstein. Clearly, this Menotti opera is even more relevant today.

 

Los Angeles, October 23, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance 

Barbara Cook | performance at Wallis Annenberg Center / 2015

getting to know her

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barbara Cook at the Bram Goldsmith Theater in the Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts, Beverly Hills, California, March 10, 2015

As I wrote in My Year 2010 and 2013 of my cultural memoirs, I have long been an admirer of singer Barbara Cook. And the other night Howard and I were delighted to be able to see her perform for the third and, surely, the last time in our lives. Now at age 87, wheel-chair bound after a recent fall and small fractures in her backbone (which the doctor has promised her will heal over time), Cook took to the stage for a one-night concert at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts which seemed more like an intimate chat with the artist than the more polished recitals we have previously witnessed.

     Yes, Cook sang, occasionally forgetting her lyrics, with a voice—although far diminished from the full-bodied renditions of “Carolina in the Morning” at the decades-earlier Washington, D.C. gay club performance when we first saw her, or the spirited rendition of Frank Loesser’s cornucopia of lyrics for his beloved “Guys and Dolls” at what is now the Geffen Theatre in Westwood of several years back—that was, nonetheless, soulful (although the microphone rendered it far darker than it truly is) and, as always, brilliantly phrased. No one in popular music can better articulate a song’s lyrics, Cook even making note of this in her comments, explaining, for example, that she had never before performed “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” because she had never understood the words (she now claims the Blackbird is a whorehouse to whom the singer is saying goodbye, and cleverly paired that song with “The House of the Rising Sun”).

     Gus Kahn’s “Makin’ Whoopee” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind,” which she performed early on, tied in perfectly with her comments on her Georgia birth. Yet the most sophisticated and well sung piece, this time ‘round, was her intelligent reading and musical director/pianist’s Lee Musiker’s arrangement of Cole Porter’s “Under My Skin.” Cook admitted that she had never truly been attracted to Porter’s songs—surely an oddity, since many of his sexual intimations would seem to suit her voice perfectly—but this classic, as she sang it, was absolutely memorable, which, she slightly bragged, had “blown” her friend Stephen Sondheim “away.”

     Her rendition of Sondheim’s “No One Is Alone” from Into the Woods certainly made it clear that Cook remains one of the most noted of Sondheim interpreters (along with, obviously, Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch). Soon after, a spunky rendition of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” showed off the musical talents of clarinetist Dave Rickenberg, drummer Warren Odze, and Bass player Jay Leonhart, as well as, again, the consummate artistry of Musiker, although the song, in its clipped declarations, is not really a comfortable one for Cook. 

      Yet one of the musical highlights of the evening came during the encore, where, moving up to the edge of the stage and laying aside her microphone, Cook gave an enlighteningly hushed rendition of George Harrison’s “Just Imagine” that brought tears to my eyes.

      One might argue that the in-between “talking sessions” were far too chatty and, at moments, perhaps, just a little bit too revealing; but that is precisely the kind of artist Cook is, and her living room-like confessions to her audience, which might have played even better in a smaller room such as the one at the Carlyle, brought an intimacy to the evening that seemed appropriate for the theatrical good-bye, which we all know will soon be inevitable. Cook reached back to her youth in Georgia, recounting her love of her salesman (first of hats and later of meat) father and the mental difficulties suffered by her mother, with whom she was forced into a rather unhealthily intimate relationship (Cook previously has noted that the two shared a bed long after Cook was a young teenager). The singer lovingly dished the other Barbra (Streisand), with whom she shared an agent, and joked about “Dick” Rodgers’ philandering ways: although he was noted for chasing young ingénues like Cook around his desk, “when he called me into his office, he fortunately was suffering from gout,” she joked.

     At other moments, Cook wryly commented of her love of Yiddish phrases, perhaps in an attempt to chat up her highly Jewish Beverly Hills audience, and downplay her Georgia past, declaring herself a born New Yorker: “The lovely thing about New York is when you go out the door, you’re there!.”

    At other moments she recalled her love for and admiration of composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who together penned Fiddler on the Roof (which she had just watched again on TMC television, leading her to hum a few lines of “Sunrise Sunset,” with audience members offering up the lyrics) and the songs for her own renowned character, Amalia, in She Loves Me.

    When an overenthusiastic audience member shouted out that she should sing “Glitter and Be Gay” from her long-ago Candide, she quickly quipped, “Now we know that someone in this audience is truly crazy!” No old favorites for this wise old bird!  

     Her story about Sondheim was one of the most revealing. After declaring her love for the composer and going so far as to compare him with Shakespeare, Cook added, as she had regarding Streisand, that he was also “quite odd.” At one celebration, she confided, he invited her to sit down at his table, whereupon she rhetorically began, “we’ve been acquainted now for so many years, I think I know you very well.” Sondheim replied, “Barbara, you don’t know me at all.” Cook suggested that it was one of the ways that he kept people “off balance,” but the remark reminded me of the deep cynicism, despite the incredible passion of his compositions, that runs through his work. It appears to me that Sondheim would hate even the concept of being really understood; his art relies too heavily on a sense of dissemblance, betrayal, and isolation for him to grant open admission to his inner being.

     Cook, on the other hand, appears to be ready to share everything with her friends, even if she might, on a more personal level, consider you a jerk, as she joked about the individual sitting on the airplane to California who asked her was she going to Los Angeles to see her grandchildren. “No you jerk, I’m going to sing!” I’m still here, working, she somewhat exasperatedly repeated, pointing to her now frailer self, sitting trapped in the wheel-controlled device.

     When we got home, I immediately pulled out our DVD of the documentary performance of Follies in Concert in 1985 at Lincoln Center and listened, spellbound, to hear her sing “Losing My Mind.” 

 

Los Angeles, March 12, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2015).        

       

Deborah Lawlor | Freddy / 2017

leaping out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Deborah Lawlor Freddy / Los Angeles, The Fountain Theatre, performed at the Los Angeles City College Theatre Academy’s Caminito Theatre, Frances Loy (director) / (the production I saw, with Pablo Capra and Paul Sands, was a matinee on Thursday, September 28, 2017).

 

Born in 1936, Fred Herko—known by his later friends in New York City as Freddy or Freddie—grew up in a middle-class family in Ossining, New York, known for the maximum-security prison Sing-Sing.

      Despite their relative poverty, when, as a young boy, Herko began showing remarkable musical talents, particularly as a pianist and flautist, his parents made sure he had lessons and even purchased a grand concert piano for the young prodigy.

     He later attended Juilliard Arts Conservatory to study piano, but, at the age of 20 determined instead to become a dancer. Herko was awarded a four-year scholarship to attend American Ballet Theater School, and later studied with major dance companies, including Merce Cunningham and James Waring, while later helping to develop and found, with dancer/performers such as David Gordon, Lucinda Childs and Yvonne Rainer, the Judson Dance Theater, which, along the music of John Cage, opened audiences up to entirely new notions of what dance might entail: it could be rubbing one’s thighs together, running in space, etc. etc.

      Yet, at the same time Herko danced more traditional modern dance works with James Waring, even choreographing new pieces. He also appeared as a back-up dancer on TV shows such as Ed Sullivan’s weekly broadcasts, with singers such Rosemary Clooney and Pearl Bailey.

      Herko, a hirsute beauty, also was a favorite for poets and playwrights, and performed in several off-off-Broadway downtown productions, including Frank O’Hara’s Love’s Labor and Rosalyn Drexler’s Home Movies, while making close friends with young dancers such as the author this play, Deborah Lawlor, and poets such as Diane di Prima, who wrote extensively of her friendship with Herko.

      Extremely active in gay sex, moreover, Herko became a favorite of Andy Warhol, performing in his movies such as Haircut (No. 1), Kiss, The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys, and Rollerskate, in which the dancer, on one roller-skate, rolled on bloody feet through the New York streets.

      The young talent was also a favorite in the Factory, showing up for late-night revelries with a group of friends—described as the “mole people” for their subterranean lifestyle and their heavy Speed usage—such as Ondine, Rotten Rita, and Billy Name.

      Herko’s long-time boyfriend was Johnny Dodd, who also appeared in Warhol movies and later worked with the Living Theater, in 1964 doing the lighting for Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Rumors had it that Herko also had a longtime relationship with the son of a wealthy Hollywood family and was kept for a while by a wealthy member of the De Rothschild family in an Upper West Side apartment. He also had a relationship with Di Prima’s husband, the poet Alan Marlowe.

      But his heavy drug use, the injections of Speed and, later, LSD, began to take its toll. By 1964 Herko had begun to miss rehearsals, and his body, so beautiful, began to fail him: he lost teeth and had a “haggard” look about him, friends declared.

      Although, that same year, Waring had cast him in a dance production of Wallace Stevens’ Carlos Among the Candles, by October of 1964, Herko was homeless. Dodd, so he reports, found him in a diner, covered with filth, dancing on the countertop, and offered to take him to his home on Cornelia Street for a bath. Other reports, so Gerard Forde, now working on a biography on Herko, assert that Freddy simply showed up a Dodd’s door.

      And the story after that is equally conflicted, most agreeing that Freddy took a bath filled with Dodd’s perfume before walking naked into the living room of the flat with the window wide open to a sunny fall day.

      Some report that Herko demanded everyone but a few leave the room. But yet many report claim they were there to observe Freddy dance to Mozart’s Coronation Mass. Dodd remembers that Freddy danced wildly, at several times charging toward the window. He, himself, wondered whether or not this was to be the “suicide performance” that Herko had long promised his friends. One can only wonder why something wasn’t done to stop the events.

      After several thrusts toward the window, Herko leaped, like Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la Rose, out the window, landing, dead, on the other side of Cornelia Street, exactly one day and 53 years ago from the production I saw—surely not a coincidence.

      Di Prima thought she perceived what was close to a suicide note when, in clearing out his personal effects, she found a novel of Mary Renault, opened to the page when the King throws himself into the ocean. But others argue that Herko was not suicidal, but simply, drugged, wanting to desperately show that he could fly. The planned Steven’s piece had him flying through a window at the end. And, often, in his performances, Herko had leaped off the 20-foot ledge of the Judson School stage without any negative effect.

      The later memorial service at Judson Church was so crowded that only a few could get it, and Warhol, soon after, offered another such service at the Factory, showing Herko’s 3 films.

       I recount this rather extended mini-history of Herko simply to demonstrate why the Fountain Theater’s co-founder, Deborah Lawlor’s, new production is such a natural and has attracted so much Los Angeles attention.

      The multi-media-based play, Freddy, looks at him through the lens of a young dancer friend named Shelley (Katie McConaughy, possibly a stand-in for Lawlor herself) and a Present-Day Shelley (Susan Wilder) who together, create most of the tension in the play between the generational facts of Freddy’s life and later perspectives about it.

       One must immediately commend this production not only for using multi-media perspectives but for joining up, as many LA productions recently have, with other organizations to achieve their goals.

       A few years back I saw a production of Tennessee Williams’ nearly impossible-to-perform Camino Real at the Boston Court Theatre in Pasadena with several cast members being students of the California Institute of the Arts that was so superb that one immediately recognized the rewards of bringing younger and older groups into the same space. Since then there have been numerous other productions of larger companies, such as the LAOpera, using newer organizations such as Redcat and the Wallis Theater for their more experimental productions to great effect. And one can only commend the wonderful Fountain Theatre choosing to produce their new Freddy at the nearby Los Angeles City College Theatre Academy (Caminito Theatre) with members of the award-winning LACC Theatre performers.

 

     The use of actor/dancers such as Alexandra Fiallos, Jamal Hopes, Tristen Kim, Jacqueline Mohr, Lamong Oakley, Connor Clark Pascale, Justice Quinn, Savannah Rutledge, Brianna Saranchock, Trenton Tabak, and Jesse Trout gives a remarkable sense of youth to this clear celebration of the young of his time who Freddy himself obviously worshipped, as well as giving a spirit to the period portrayed in the play.

      Heading, with Stephen Sachs the great theatre company of the Fountain, Deborah Lawlor, who was for years a dancer herself and knew Freddy Herko, the fact of which gives the whole production a further gravitas. This is, in part, her personal vision of the completely charismatic dancer/performer, and, in that sense, it is a kind of special vision which we must admire.

     Unfortunately (and I wince, given admiration of both Lawlor and her company and commitment to Los Angeles theater in saying this), it is a kind of one-dimensional vision. In her production, instead of portraying what are the obvious complexities of Herko’s sensibility, we see what can only be described as authorial announcements of events: this happened and then and then. Herko’s obviously conflicted life is attributed primarily to his endless sexual activities and, primarily, his enchantment with drugs. At one dramatic point he even introduces the totally innocent Past Shelley to heroin.

      I’m not questioning whether or not that really happened: I’m sure it might have. But the play, focusing as it does on his sexuality and drug habits makes it almost appear that Herko was a two-dimensional figure who had little else going for him; we see little of his dance, his theatrical talents, his obvious “charismatic” encounters, not even his personal sexual relationships with others. We’re simply told what happened, not who he really is or even was, despite the dual perspective. I have to admit that, without any evidence, that Lawlor’s script even hints that if Freddy hadn’t died of drugs and self-destructive behavior, he might have died, soon after, of AIDS. Lawlor does not say this. It’s just there is this simplistic statement of his problems leads, unfortunately, to that conclusion. In this version, it appears, he was suffering from too much drugs and way too much sex.

      Marty Dew, playing Herko, is an attractive man who can obviously dance well, given the help of Movement and Dance Director Cate Caplin and choreographer Gary Franco. He’s an attractive figure who keeps one spellbound; but, I’m sorry to say, he doesn’t yet have the theater “chops” to really portray what were the obvious dilemmas of Herko’s life.

     The play, using Javanese-like puppet figures, does attempt to reveal the young Herko’s childhood where he was encouraged by his family to play the piano. But it doesn’t truly deal with the awful truths such as when Freddy revealed to his father that he wanted to change to ballet he was beaten.

      That “little” fact alone suggests that this man was eternally torn by the projectives of his life. The Julliard School reported that he was unable to “focus,” which means, of course, that he had an inability to commit to the years and years of intense practicing that it might take to become a concert pianist. Herko was clearly a poly-talent, a man with so many gifts that he didn’t quite know how to share them. And, looking back on his history, how could he, given the time in which he lived, possibly find an easy solution? Yes, there were many in his community who were intensely seeking to find multi-cultural ways in which to experience art; but the society at large was in closure, a world in which it was not so easy to cross “over” the many, many boundaries that art and life put up before the individual. One only needs to read Michael S. Sherry’s Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy to confirm it.

      Diane Di Prima raged against Freddy’s endless gay encounters, for example, in her poem “Fucking Again.” He was late for another date with her. Herko’s current biographer, Forde writes that “He liked hanging out in sleazy bars.”

     What, I might ask, were not sleazy bars in that gay-phobic world? Even in 1969, five years after Freddy’s death, I visited New York bars which anybody in my hometown (and even in New York) would have described as sleazy, the Stonewall being one of the worst of them!

     Freddy was truly seeking love in everything he did. The night before his death he performed on the roof of the Judson Church without a single person having bothered to attend. I’ve had such poetry readings, but I can’t imagine what that might have meant to this fragile man, physically falling apart before his own eyes.

     Lawlor’s production is one in which the audience must really “make believe,” must imagine rather than truly experience the characters. For these young actors don’t quite yet know how, despite their obvious talents, to put the darker and lighter elements of their characters into greater relief. Whether they are running through the openly sexual environs of Warhol’s The Factory, or trying to discover their own personal sensibilities, they seem to be simply sleep-walking through their own acting out of their characters. Surely the figures they represent might have something deeper to say, to query their own choices, even as they recognize they can no longer make such choices. Only Wilder (as the Present-Day Shelley) seems to be able to understand some of the errors of your younger perception.

      And then, there is Herko himself, obviously a sort of Peter Pan-like character, living out his life in as far more delusional “flower-child”-like perspective than the West coast’s San Francisco figures of the early 1960s. These New York folk, nonetheless, were also innocents gone over the edge into a kind of Never-Never Land from which they simply could not return. It can only be such young people as in this performance who can truly convey why, in a world in which a person like Freddy—in the endless diminutive of his own manhood expressed by his very name— might determine to truly become a Peter Pan, leaping through that Cornelia Street window despite and because of the fact that he knew he was now too old for the voyage. He had already performed as a dancer who falls through the skies in Waring’s Icarus, with sets and costumes by Robert Indiana.  

 

    The great dancer Paul Taylor, also a late-to-life dancer, once told me (when I was 21 or 22) that “You’re never too old to become a dancer.” But I knew he was lying, that no matter how hard I studied (as I did that year at the Joffrey Ballet Company) that I had come into to it far too late—despite some very nice comments from my severely authoritarian ballet teachers.

     Freddy suggested to Di Prima that he needed Speed to allow him to do what he desired to do since he come so late to dance. But he clearly misunderstood what Speed really was. As graduate students in the early 1970s, my companion Howard and I—both of whom hated and continue to hate the use of any drugs—did explore Speed a couple of times to finish writing deadlines. In fact, I wrote a couple of my essays from my Masters’ Thesis on Eudora Welty with the enhancement of Speed.

     Yet, we both realized that instead of slowing down time so that we might work against the imaginary clock, if we encountered one another during these times we would suddenly engage in conversations that took hours away from our true work, making us lose what we were actually trying to gain.

     Herko wasn’t losing time, but actually gaining it, his body suddenly decaying, his mind lost in a kind of space that took years away from his talented imagination and physical abilities.

    His final leap through that window may not have been an intentional suicidal but it was a leap outside of reality, outside of time, outside of his own remarkable contributions—a leap into a reality beyond us. And, in retrospect, it is damnably painful for all those who might have wished he could have lived on to exorcise/exercise his so-many talents.

    But, in the end, I beg you, don’t read my piece alone. Go see the performance, Freddy, which brought me to all these words. It’s worth seeing and wondering after.

 

Los Angeles, September 29, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 29, 2017).

Vicki Ray | Rivers of Time / 2019

simple songs and wild variations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vicki Ray (piano), Rivers of Time, with Carole Kim (visuals) / Los Angeles, REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney / CalArts Theater), the performance I attended was on January 16, 2019

 

Last night’s piano concert by Vicki Ray, quite simply, was one of the best concerts of contemporary piano music I have ever attended.

     Ray, whose performances I have always admired, was at her very best, particularly in the first piece of the evening, “Sometimes I Feel Like My Time Ain’t Long” by Los Angeles composer Ben Phelps. The composer begins his work with a song sung with piano accompaniment from a wax cylinder recording that is part of the Library of Congress’ Alan Lomax Collection, a song recorded by Lomax in a Clemson, South Carolina house sung by Brady Walker, William Grant, Mary Lee, Thomas Trimmer, and Phil Butler. The simple gospel piece crackles and wavers in its tones on the recording, and Phelps uses those elements in his eight variations on that original tune to create an outstanding exploration of tonal variation.

 

      Gradually, as the work moves forward, the very complexities of this seemingly simple tune grow into more and more complex arpeggios, as we begin to realize through the piano’s variations of pitch that time is both limited and complex: what seems like the momentary becomes suspended in space, and the long musical intervals appear to be far-too-brief passages. It is a work that forces one to consider even the nature of music itself, as you settle in to the various variations of the tune. I could almost have listened to this dialogue between the original 1939 recording and the experimental “takes” on it for an entire evening. And I think the audience was stunned into silence when the work finally came to a close, since it might have almost spun out into an entire symphony for piano only. For me it was truly awe-inspiring, and I could not imagine how the concert might even continue after the intermission.

       During the break I turned to my seated neighbors, who with my questions, reported that they’d traveled through the rainy night the long way from Ventura, having even become lost on their trip. Fred and Carolyn (I never got their last name) were friends, evidently, of the second composer, Daniel Lentz, who now lives in Santa Barbara, and to whom the couple introduced me after the performance.

      Lentz’s work, “River of 1,000 Streams,” which presumably involved electronic intervention, was a bit like a contemporary version of the cascading refrains of Smetana’s The Moldau, but without that earlier work’s sentimentality. Here the repeating refrains were overlaid by the layers of electronic tremolos in a way that did not so much imitate the water’s flow as it moved through the countryside, but, through Ray’s virtuosic playing resonated throughout the Redcat theater, almost matching the rare Los Angeles downpour outside.

     If the earlier piece was a kind of echo and variation, this work, although I might argue it is somewhat similar in structure, builds its chords from the bass to the high soprano keys of the piano, roiling up another kind of “stream” from the bowels of the instrument into its final piercingly high screams. Once again, Ray was a significant on-stage force, someone from whom hardly anyone might wish to remove their eyes.

     Of less interest, accordingly, were Carole Kim’s visual contributions—a screen behind the piano and a kind of multi-colored wall to the left of the piano, at the right side of the stage to the audience. Kim’s black-and-white and sometimes colored prism-like images combining crystalline-like structures with undulating amoebic-like figures were quite often fascinating, but seemed, at least to me, to have little relationship to the compositions.

      Spotting Ray’s companion, Tom Frick, in the lobby, I greeted him and was delighted to be introduced to the pianist’s justifiably proud mother.

 

Los Angeles, January 17, 2019

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

Georges Bizet | Carmen / 2019

three hateful figures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Georges Bizet (composer), Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac (libretto, based on the novella by Prosper Mérimée), Richard Eyre (director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Carmen / 2019 [Metropolitan Opera live-HD film]

 

Over numerous years I have come to know almost every aria in and the plot of Carmen, but oddly enough I had never seen a performance of the popular opera. So, the announcement by the Metropolitan Opera that this year they were including their tragic tale of the gypsy Carmen and the soldier Don José in their live HD broadcast, led Howard and me to buy tickets. And this production was such an excellent one, that feel that perhaps I need not see another.

     I say that, knowing that I might truly enjoy hearing Georges Bizet’s most memorable score, and would truly enjoy singers performing it of the quality of this production, but must also proclaim that the central characters are all rather repulsive. 

      Yes, Carmen (Clémentine Margaine in this production) is a truly independent spirit, who will have love only on her terms, as she expresses it in her Act 1 "Habanera.” If in a society where men generally made the decision about whom they loved, the cigarette girl, given her beauty, is able to make her own choices of lovers and to declare that her shifting interests may result in heart-break or even death for her former lovers. In short, she recognizes herself as a dangerous siren who spends a great deal of energy in playing a kind of dominating whore, spinning webs around men only to leave them entrapped when she moves on to her next lover. And all those around her, apparently, know her pattern and steer clear of her sexual enticements. Only outsiders such as Don José (Roberto Alagna) and the toreador, Escamillo (Alexander Vinogradov) might allow themselves to fall for her charms.

      It is precisely her independence and willfulness that attracts men to her. In a society of feminine passivity, Carmen stands out in her alluring masculine-like stance. One might even observe that she symbolically stands for soldiers and toreadors alike—both groups of which, because of their historical association with their own sex and their colorful costumes, have long been the focus of gay intrigue—as a kind of acceptable drag incarnation of their male colleagues. *

     But Carmen also is a betrayer, a violent fighter, a smuggler, and thief, who entices the flustered Don José not only to leave the saintly—and again quite passive female, who visits her would-be lover only upon instructions and the pleas of Don José’s mother, Micaéla (Aleksandra Kurzak, in real life the wife of Alagna) free her from arrestment, for which he is imprisoned for months, to leave his employment as a soldier, and to join the gypsy smugglers. True, he is intoxicated by his love for Carmen, but we also see through these acts just how weak he is as a man. In a sense, Don José is as passive as Carmen is independent. And he too has now betrayed all those to whom he was formerly committed. Is it any wonder that Carmen can no longer admire or love him? By giving in to all of her demands he has simply shown himself as a male weakling (and we must remember that Mérimée’s tale is very much about gender stereotypes, even if they are often overturned).

      Carmen has now fallen in love with an equally odious being, the self-enchanted, braggadocios bull-fighter from Seville, Escamillo. The children (which are absolutely wonderful in this production, which provided them even with a backstage interview in the intermission) and the locals may all celebrate his achievements, but there is something amiss with this “hero.” Escamillo may appear brave to attempt to visit the smuggler’s mountain hangout to seek out Carmen, but he is quickly bested in a fight with Carmen’s cohorts and backs off. 

     Even if Carmen is currently smitten by him, we recognize that she will eventually perceive his true cowardice and will leave him as well. Fortunately, we never discover what might have occurred in their relationship, but it might be interesting as a separate work to imagine what their relationship would have been and how it might have ended—surely, once more, in violence.

    The true hero of this opera is Micaéla, who truly enters the lion’s den of the smuggler’s hideout, trembling with fear, not only for her encounter with the suspicious males, but for having to encounter her nemesis Carmen. Yet only she is able, temporarily at least, of weaning Don José away from this world so that he might attend to his mother’s impending death.

      Her victory, however, is a short one. He returns to Carmen, this time taking on the most horrific role he might ever embody of a murderer, waiting to be arrested and hung.

     No matter how you might view conventional behavior, you have to be shocked by the trio of horrific beings at the center of this story. Opera is filled with hateful figures, criminals, rapists, and many, many murderers. But these three rather shady figures starring in a single work may be a kind of record.

    They all may be proclaiming love, but the results of that love make you shudder. Even Don Giovanni, the lecherous count also roaming the Seville streets, seems almost saintly in comparison.

As the gentle and mostly unjudgmental Howard said, upon leaving the theater, “these are not such nice people.”

     I was enchanted by the performances and music, even if it didn’t make me want to abandon my life and run into the mountains.

 

*It’s fascinating, simply as a coincidental piece of gay gossip, that Marcel Proust, after Bizet’s death, befriended the composer’s wife and son, upon whom he based two of the central figures in his masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. The author of the original Carmen, Prosper Mérimée, although having occasional affairs and long correspondence with women, never married and lived most of his life with his mother. He did have a one-night stand, apparently, with George Sand (not impressed with his sexual prowess), who might almost be portrayed as a kind of Carmen, a strong-willed, talented seductress of many powerful men.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2019

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