Edward Albee | Seascape / 2005

living darwinism

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward Albee Seascape / Booth Theatre, the production I attended was a matinee performance on November 6, 2005

 

A retired married couple, Nancy and Charlie, are enjoying a seaside beach. She is painting; he, resting on a nearby blanket. The only interruption of their obvious pleasures is the roaring of a jet plane.

     We soon discover, however, that other less pleasurable issues lie just below the surface. Nancy enjoys the day so thoroughly that she would like to “stay [on the beach] forever!” She loves the water, the air, the sand, the dunes, the beach grass, and the sunshine, and imagines the possibility of moving from beach to beach, going “around the world and never leav[ing] the beach…” The more practical Charlie scoffs at the notion. But she persists: it’s necessary to find out what he really likes and “make all the plans.” But Charlie, clearly, prefers doing nothing, just vegetating: no planning for enjoyment is in his view of the short future they may have left.

      So Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Seascape begins. It’s a small spat, a typical domestic debate, and on one level the play never seems to rise above this—the small, domestic issues of a healthy but slightly aging couple attempting to determine what to do with their future. Even the sudden appearance of a couple of marvelously colored lizards curious about these beachside interlopers doesn’t move the play far off topic: for the lizards not only speak fluent English, but they, too, are a monogamous couple attempting to determine what the future holds in store.

     Despite some moments of terror, some suggestions of dark horror, and a great deal of humor as the two “animals” and two “humans” attempt to comprehend each other’s worlds, the play seems, as The New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley wrote of the production I recently saw, to “lack emotional gravity,” to be perfectly likeable but also, in some way, “forgettable”—particularly in the context of Albee’s more highly emotionally pitched oeuvre. In some respects, I agree. There is a problem at the heart of this play that relates to the text’s seeming insistence on a kind of realist fantasy. The lizards who seem ready to climb out of their watery domain into a Darwinian transformation seem too glibly linked by their author to their human counterparts; the humans, in turn, seem too ready to embrace them, to understand their dilemmas and even help them adapt to the brave new world they are about to enter. The human couple insist that there is no way for the lizards to return to the sea: “You’ll have to come back…sooner or later. You don’t have any choice.” And we clearly recognize that the final lines of the play, the male lizard Leslie’s challenge to their offer of help: “All right. Begin.” is a hollow one, since the humans cannot even agree on to handle the issues facing their own lives. Should they act out a kind of desperate series of adventures to temporarily stave off what is soon to be their fate or should they, as Charlie’s actions suggest, curl into an eternal nap?

       Part of the problem that arises in the current production is that the wonderfully able actress Frances Sternhagen may not have the best choice for the role of Nancy. In the original play the role was performed by Deborah Kerr, and, although I never saw that production I can imagine the kind of plucky common sense (witnessed in Kerr’s role as a nun in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison) and the slightly romantic and dreamy figure (as she played in The King and I) that might allow the mix of reality and fantasy so necessary in this work. Sternhagen plays the role, rather, as a kind Connecticut do-gooder against George Grizzard’s curmudgeonly city-dweller, and the mix doesn’t allow the play to slip into the metaphoric dimension into which it seems naturally to want to expand.

     Albee is not at all interested in the redemption of two bestial creatures, but in the possible redemption of a human couple’s life. As Charlie points out, it would be impossible to recount to anyone their conversation with two lizards. The lizards are, after all, not “real” but phantasmagorical mirror images of the couple themselves. Charlie’s own childhood activity of standing and sitting for long periods at the dark bottom of bodies of water is paralleled by the former activities of their lizard counterparts. In short, he has always had the predilection to return to a beast-like state. On the other hand, Nancy, not unlike the giant birds the lizards recognize in the passing airplanes, is almost ready to fly away in own extended visions of possibility. In order to live life to its fullest does one have to chase the future until, utterly exhausted, one falls into one’s grave? To be an actively living species does it necessarily mean one has to embrace every possible Darwinian change?

      The vision this human couple share, that they indeed are not very different from the beasts from which their kind sprang, is, perhaps, an obvious one, even a fairly likeable conclusion (if you’re not a religious fundamentalist)—but it is not forgettable, or at least to should not be forgettable. For it is that vision that leads us to these very questions and the solutions necessary for the successful continuation of our lives. If war between the sexes and between generations is the subject of many of Albee’s dramas, it is the possibility of peace that he here proposes. We have to help one another, he implies, to begin living the human potentiality of our lives.

 

Los Angeles, November 25, 2005

 

Noël Coward | Blithe Spirit / 2015

breaking away

by Douglas Messerli

 

Noël Coward Blithe Spirit / Los Angeles, Ahmanson Theatre, the performance I attended was the matinee of January 11, 2015

 

When I wrote on the film version of Blithe Spirit in late June last year, little did I know I would be seeing a stage production early in the new year—for I might have combined the two and compared them.

     Having now written on a play that I still do not perceive as deeply profound, I have little more to say. Let me just begin by admitting that, as great as it is to see Angela Lansbury exuberantly performing at the age of nearly 90—one of five memorable occasions when I have seen her perform brilliantly on stage (I’d seen her previously in Dear World, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd and The Best Man)—she cannot compare to the impervious fortress of eccentricities created by Margaret Rutherford. Despite her wonderful comic timing, and her balletic machinations as she prepares to collapse from trance to trance, she is reasonably sane when compared with Rutherford’s rendition of Madame Arcati. And, understandably, she appears a bit frail. Still, since nearly everyone, including myself, is in love with Lansbury, it hardly matters. That she is still “here,” after all these years, and her clowning through the mad séances and hocus pocus mutters of Coward’s dark comedy is enough! The remaining cast members, particularly, Charlotte Parry as Ruth, Charles Edwards aa Charles, and Jemina Rooper as Elvira are all capable and convincing. 

 

    What did strike me seeing the play version of the work, embraced in the theatrical conventions of its original subtitle, “An Improbable Comedy,” was just how serious this work really is at heart. Yes, Blithe Spirit is still funny, to which the guttural howls of the man seated behind me attested; the entire audience, indeed, laughed on cue, particularly when Charles was attempting to converse with his spectral ex-wife Elvira while explaining his extra-sensory perceptions to his understandably skeptical current wife, Ruth. And Madame Arcati is simply, as they used to say, a hoot: a wise owl who knows she’s odd and loves being so; offended only when she is described as an amateur, she knows well that, daft or not, she is the “real” thing. And there were moments, of course, in which even I could not hold back my giggles.

    Yet, as Barry Day, writing in the play’s program, pointed out, Coward’s play shares a great deal with the works of Harold Pinter such as The Homecoming or even the farces of Joe Orton (on my mind, since my companion and I recently saw a production of his What the Butler Saw). If the characters express a series of witty bon mots, they are aimed with all seriousness at one another. As Day points out, in this play Charles Condomine is not only “between women,” but is a kind of bigamist—and utterly enchanted, at least for a while, by the situation. Ruth provides him a highly organized, efficient and intelligent existence, wherein she even helps, so he declares to Elvira, with his writing. Elvira, on the other hand, imbues with life with a blithe spirit, an ethereal and comic lightness and beauty that Ruth cannot provide. In short, Ruth is the real and ordinary, while Elvira, even when she was alive, was simply spirit. The balance is perfect, particularly for a man who appears to have little to offer himself. His major occupation, we must remember, is writing rather predictable murder mysteries, such as the one on which is about to embark, concerning a fraudulent and murderous medium. The fact that Madame Arcati is neither a fake nor has any evil intentions but actually does—with the help of their hyper-energized servant, Edith—conjure up a ghost, nixes his boring story. It seems doubtful, at play’s end, that he will write again—unless it is to recount his horrifying experiences with marriage and the dead. 

     Predictably, in their frustration and anger with him and the situation in which they find themselves—particularly after Ruth as well as Elvira joins the dead, arguing that Charles, metaphorically speaking, has helped to “kill them off”—the two women begin to perceive all they have lost, the jokes grow less and less humorous as they turn into bitter jibes and lashing out against transgressions present and past. And explicably, Charles increasingly wishes to be rid of both of them. When he finally succeeds, all hell breaks loose, as his comfy Kent castle is vengefully shattered and destroyed. The real and the spiritual collide to create chaos, sending this selfish Adam out of paradise into the cold Folkestone streets and, presumably, to a long overseas voyage from which he can never safely return. A bit like the self-centered Teddy of Pinter’s The Homecoming, Charles leaves love behind in the ruins, as he moves toward what is probably a meaningless and empty life. If he has temporarily been a bigamist, by play’s end he is a bachelor, akin to his creator, free to seek out the company of his own kind. 

    What has begun as a kind of domestic comedy, accordingly, ends, quite misogynistically, as a tale of man who, having finally weaned himself away from the women he has used and abused all of his life, is condemned to wander the earth just as his wives are doomed to inhabit his now ruined habitat. One might also argue, on the other hand, that Charles has finally entrapped his women in the domestic world at which he saw himself as the center, but which he is now free, however pointlessly, to escape. Whatever is “out there” may be without love, but it possibly may provide new adventures nonetheless, a life he formerly could not imagine.

 

Los Angeles, January 12, 2015

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

Nico Muhly, Nicholas Wright,and Winston Graham | Marnie / 2018

tumbling through their own sentences

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nico Muhly (composer), Nicholas Wright and Winston Graham (libretto), Michael Mayer (stage director), Habib Azar (film director) Marnie / 2018 [Metropolitan Opera live-HD film]

 

I should begin this essay by admitting that I never much liked Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 film Marnie, mostly because of its hack psychological story, as retooled from Winston Graham’s 1961 novel by screenwriter Jay Presson Allen. I have never much liked her film-writing and doctoring, including works such as The Prime of Miss Brodie, Travels with My Aunt, Forty Carats, Cabaret, Funny Lady and other box-office successes.

     What she basically does is take important novels and plays and “re-fix” them in ways that exaggerate their characters, Liza Minelli’s portrayal of Sally Bowles in Cabaret being a perfect example (she complained that director-choreographer Bob Fosse didn’t much like the Bowles figure, and if you properly read the Isherwood book, why should you?) Although she was known as someone who might re-write and improve works, I think she often turned them into glossier versions of what were actually darker pieces of writing, and Marnie, in particular, seemed like a film, under Hitchcock’s handling, about a tortured psychotic whose problems were simply explained away with a childhood incident in which, seeing her prostitute mother being attacked by a sailor, she took up a fireplace poker and clubbed the intruder to death, the sudden remembrance of which frees her to remain with her husband, Mark Rutland, as her protector instead of facing jail time for her numerous acts of robbery in her past.

      I attended the new Metropolitan opera live-HD production yesterday, accordingly, with some consternation and a great many doubts. Although Muhly and his librettist Nicholas Wright immediately embraced the idea of turning Graham’s novel into an opera, I still feel it’s a highly confused and second-rate work. Even if we discover the heart of Marnie’s problems are quite different from the movie, it doesn’t still quite explain her hatred of all men and her insistence upon robbing them and turning much of her evil gain over to her detestable mother (a bad woman through and through as even her performer Denyce Graves admitted in an intermission interview). But, at least, in refocusing on the novel, Muhly and Wright, along with director Michael Mayer, have given us a much stronger and denser work, which takes the celebrity luster off both the Tipi Hedren and Sean Connery characters, exposing their far darker natures.

      Fortunately, Isabel Leonard (as Marnie) and Christopher Maltman (as Mark) are remarkable singers who take their cues from oboe and trombone intrusions all colored with Muhly’s lyrical explorations that occasionally remind us of Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Vertigo, and other Hitchcock scores, including Marnie.

      That is not to say that Muhly’s score is not original. In fact, along with Wright’s libretto, Mulhy pulls the work away from the great film director’s version, taking its figures deeper into the shadows of human behavior by not only repeating the heroine’s seemingly pointless behavior, but revealing the ugly manipulation of Rutland, who, after discovering Marnie’s role as a serial thief, forces her into a marriage and who, finally in frustration, he tries to rape. The end of Act I ends violently with her attempt to slit her wrists in rejection of his advancements.

     The introduction of Mark’s rather sleazy brother, Terry (played by countertenor Iestyn Davies), moreover, takes us into yet another dimension. This Cain-marked man—a red patch crosses his face from birth—also allies him to the outsider if nearly-perfect looking Marnie. As Davies recognized about his character, although he is another detestable figure in this tale of anti-heroes, he is the truthteller, determined to make Marnie realize who she truly is.

 

     But, obviously—given the fact that Muhly and Wright have literally split Marnie’s character into four other madrigal singers, dressed and with hair coifed in a similar manner, simply wearing differently colored coats, representing a few of her various identities—it is nearly impossible for her to discover who she is. If Terry sees her as simply a liar, she perceives herself primarily as a survivor, someone who is attempting to stay alive by challenging all the dominant men (and women) in her world who tell her, time and again, that she is not only worthless but an evil being.

      The worst of these is her own mother who has convinced her daughter that she has jealously suffocated her baby brother soon after his birth—an absolutely horrific possibility completely exorcised from Allen’s screenplay. But Mark’s own mother (Janis Kelly) is not much of a less monster for him, deciding that despite her distaste for his appearance and morals, that Terry is perhaps more ruthless and, accordingly, better able to run her son’s printing operation. If Kelly, in an intermission interview saw her character as only being “strong” instead of evil, the book, in which Mark’s mother is secretly buying up stocks in the company in order to oust mark, makes it apparent that she too is a kind of monster. In short, no one in this opera version is a truly good person. Each wants something from the others.

 

    Strutt, the first we see among the many Marnie has robbed, wants only payment, presumably endless, for her having broken the illusion that she was an extension of his ego. Others in her past creep out of the woodwork, represented by the group of black-suited men who dance always around Marnie and her four symbolic selves (with wonderful choreography by Lynne Page).  Is it any wonder that Marnie hates men?

      Relocated from Virginia and Maryland back into its original location of the English countryside, it makes total sense for Marnie to be a horse woman who prefers the beast to men. Her horse, Florio, she luminously sings, is the only being she truly loves. But even here she is betrayed as, when she is disgusted by the hounds who are attempting to rout out a vixen from her den—surely a cornered beast with whom she can identify—she turns Florio away, sending him on a wild race away from the hunt, which ends in his disastrous stumble over a wall, Mark’s own fall into a hospital bed, and Marnie being forced to take out a gun and kill the only thing she ever loved.

     She is now finally ready to continue her criminal career, stealing Mark’s keys and breaking into his safe. Yet something has changed; she can no longer put the easy money she discovers into her purse. Perhaps the very fact that he has stayed by her side, even knowing the truth, has altered her perception of men. He may have brutally used her to capture her as a bride, yet he has remained a kind of gentleman of sorts.

     The discovery of the truth, after her mother’s death, that it was Marnie’s mother who herself strangled her newborn, the central character of what we now realize is a kind of study in morality in a world with little morality to offer, beauteously thrills of her freedom at the very moment that handcuffs are placed around her wrists. Again, unlike the film, Marnie is not “saved” or even protected by Mark’s chauvinistic actions but must now make her own decisions of how to salvage her life, becoming perhaps the only character who is truly free from the ugly controls imposed upon others. If in her robberies she might have imagined she controlled the men for whom she worked, she now perceives that they simply ruled her behavior, and in that recognition becomes a kind of feminist figure able now to go her own way, wherever that may lead her.

     Marnie may still not be a great opera, but it is certainly a fascinating one, where the composer and librettist rarely permit their characters to sing out full sentences in a world that won’t entirely allow them to speak out any true emotion or truth. Tumbling through the mostly exuberant score, the singers come at last to a kind of peace with their own inabilities to express the fullness of their lives. And Muhly’s opera transcends its own somewhat pedestrian story.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2018

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

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).