Alban Berg | Lulu / 2015

desire severed from reward

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alban Berg (libretto, based on Frank Wedekind’s Der Erdgeist and Die Büche der Pandora, and composer) Lulu / live HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera in New York / the production I saw with Howard N. Fox and Pablo Capra was on November 21, 2015

 

The plays of Frank Wedekind, in their combination of naturalist issues and Expressionistic methods—despite their often somewhat clumsy plots and confusing character delineation—seem to be continually ahead of their times, finding major re-adaption within later theatrical conventions. The recent musical adaptions of his Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening) of 1891, for example, reveal that the social-sexual issues of young adolescents at the turn of the 20th century have much in common with the problems of today’s 21st century youths.

    Similarly, composer Alban Berg found the perverse sexual and social actions of Wedekind’s two Lulu plays, Der Erdgeist (1895) and Die Büche der Pandora (1903) quite perfectly summed up the outrageous mores and extravagant behaviors of his Weimar Republic.

     Alas, because of the Nationalist Socialist rise and Berg’s early death, the opera was left unfinished in 1935, and would not receive its full three-act version, completed by Friedrich Cerha, until 1979.  But that fact, along with Berg’s innovative use of the musical twelve-tone system, has perhaps helped to make Berg’s version appear far more modern and ahead of its time than even G. W. Pabst’s credible and quite remarkable Weimer- period film, Pandora’s Box, of 1928, starring the unforgettable Louise Brooks (see My Year 2001).

      Today, with the India-ink projected images by artist William Kentridge and the consummate singing and acting skills of Marlis Petersen as Lulu (who has declared this as the last of her Lulu performances), the Metropolitan Opera production which my companion Howard and my editor Pablo Capra attended with me in a high definition live production—even while placing the work and very much establishing it as part of the years just prior to Hitler’s rise—seemed fresher than ever, as if Wedekind’s dialogue might be playing out in the headlines of today’s tabloids.

      Berg’s Brechtian prologue, his reorientation of the work to balance Lulu’s lesbian encounters with the series of male lovers whom she destroys, and his emphasis on the play’s clearly feminist themes (Pabst omits most of Lulu’s later relationship with Countess Gerschwitz [Susan Graham], and, accordingly, cuts her declaration that she will return to school and fight for women’s rights), along with his closer loyalty to the original plays throughout, which, although sometimes clutters up the landscape, nonetheless further modernizes the work, revealing the utter audacity of Wedekind’s originals.

    Berg, far more than Pabst, convinces us of Lulu’s immoral madness, revealing her unfeeling consummation of her lovers: her physician husband; her painter companion (Paul Groves); the newspaper owner Dr. Schön (Johan Reuter)— the only man she personally kills, and perhaps the only man she truly loves—Schön’s son Alwa (Daniel Brenna), and Countess Gerschwitz. Yet he also, more successfully than Pabst, shows us how Lulu, out of true love through the limited views of each of her lovers, is manipulated by them. The tragedy of this work, much as in Berlin Alexanderplatz, emanates from the reality of how much these figures use each other purely for their own needs, ending in a necessary bloodbath—which, on a far larger scale, is precisely what happened, of course, to the whole of Germany under Hitler’s control. The only major figure of this opera to survive is the man who may have fathered her and, more definitely, “created” her—through his lessons on how to survive as a prostitute-courtesan—is Schigolch (Franz Grundheber), who like Alexanderplatz’s Franz Bieberkopf survives only because he has become, by work’s end, utterly insignificant.

     Indeed, both Berg and Wedekind, more than Pabst, reveal that everyone in this tragedy, including Lulu, by the time of her death, has become meaningless. Each of them simply desires—revealed in Kentridge’s expressionist emblems such as Lulu’s and other characters’ donning of outsized white gloves—without offering much in return. Lulu’s world is one in which nearly everyone is seeking love, money, and fame without sacrificing themselves. In the end, only two characters actually are willing to give of themselves—and both of them are women.

     Countess Gerschwitz allows herself to be imprisoned in Lulu’s stead, and attempts to raise money to help her friend-lover to survive and to escape. And even after she is rejected endlessly by the object of her desire, she returns to Lulu’s hovel, only to be killed by the Jack the Ripper-like figure who destroys her after killing Lulu.

     Lulu, strangely enough, offers up not only her body, but is willing, at least in Schön’s case, to give up her heart; and ultimately, she prostitutes to save the starving Alwa and Schigolch.   

     Although the males of the tale strut the stage and destroy themselves out of what they describe as Lulu’s betrayals, they give nothing in return except financial support, which is always proffered as a transaction instead of presented as an outright gift. Although Lulu may pretend that some of her relationships have nothing to do with prostitution, in the society that Berg and Wedekind present, all human relationships seem to be built on transactional involvements. Even Gerschwitz hopes that her money might buy her love.

     In such a world, everything ends where it has begun, with someone demanding something from or swindling something from the other. Berg emphasizes this in not only through the predetermined musical structures of his twelve-tone system, but in the palindromic system of the work’s structural events. Not only are characters intentionally asked to portray others—Schön becomes Jack the Ripper, the Painter is the African Prince, etc.—but everything happens again and again. As if they were hamsters on a treadmill, the men Lulu encounters destroy themselves and each other like late 19th century dualists who fight for something that they do not truly control, but rather controls them. Berg makes clear that the society in which he lives—extending back even to Wedekind’s pre-World War drama—is doomed to destruction.

     If by opera’s end, Lulu has become a hag, of so little value in the thinking of her murderer, that she is better off dead, Lulu, unlike any other figure in the work—except perhaps for Gerschwitz—finally is willing to offer herself freely, without financial, societal, or even sexual ties. Human needs and desire have finally been severed from reward.

 

Los Angeles, November 24, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2015).

Eugene O’Neill | Ah, Wilderness! / 2015

sitting in the moonlight

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugene O’Neill Ah, Wilderness! / San Francisco, A.C.T. (American Conservatory Theater) at the Geary Theater / the performance I saw was the matinee of October 24, 2015.

 

As numerous critics since its first appearance in 1933 have noted, Eugene O’Neill’s comedy Ah, Wilderness! is almost the mirror opposite of his great family drama of 1957, Long Day’s Journey into Night. Reviewing the 1988 New York revival of the comedy, Frank Rich argues that the life of the central character of Ah, Wilderness!, Arthur Miller, represents the boyhood O’Neill might have wished for himself instead of one he lived out with his penurious, unloving father, his drunken brother, and his drug-dependent mother.

     Certainly, the early work has intimations of that world. Arthur’s uncle Sid (Dan Hiatt) is known as an alcoholic and returns from the play’s 4th of July picnic so inebriated that he dares to entertain the family with his satiric reiteration of his brother-in-law Nat’s (Anthony Fusco) often told stories by claiming to have invented the lobsters heaped upon their table, and, is soon after trotted off to bed. Sid, furthermore, has just, once again, lost his job.

 

    The family’s aunt Lilly (Margo Hall), is a woman so opposed to alcohol and unforgiving about those who imbibe that she is determined to remain a lonely school teacher, forced to live at home, rather than marry Sid, the man everyone recognizes she loves.

     Arthur’s elder brother, Richard (Thomas Stagnitta), a student at Yale, is seemingly as empty-minded as Arthur is a passionate reader. Deeply affected and troubled by everything he reads—which includes a great many works by the likes of Ibsen, Shaw, Wilde, Emma Goldman, and Omar Khayyám—Arthur, in his despair over his girlfriend’s Muriel’s seeming abandonment of him, not only sneaks out of the house without reporting to his family, but visits a local “dive” with two “tarts,” one of whom, Belle (Caitlan Taylor), gets him drunk and attempts to seduce him to join her in an upstairs bedroom.

     Yet, all in all, family life in Ah, Wilderness! is as innocent and sentimental as The Music Man or Meet Me in St. Louis, and even uses some of the same tropes (Mrs. Shinn, the mayor’s wife in The Music Man is also outraged by her daughter’s reading of Omar Khayyám, and the mayor of the small Iowa town is convinced of the young Tommy’s deprived behavior as is David McComber [Adrian Roberts] of Arthur’s moral upbringing in the O’Neill play). It is no accident that O’Neill’s play was transformed, somewhat successfully, into a musical, Take Me Along.

     The Miller family, for all their worries and fears about each other, is full of love and desperate to protect one another in a way that O’Neill’s real family might never have imagined possible. The playwright’s view of the small New England community wherein the Miller’s reside is so idealistic and hopeful, in fact, that it makes Thornton Wilder’s Grovers Corners look like a bit like dreary depressed village.

    Even punishment here is postponed and eventually abandoned. Apparently Mr. Miller and his loving wife Essie (Rachel Ticotin) have never laid a hand on their children. Late in the play, when the large moon has seemingly covered the entire town in its glowing light, Nat and Essie and their son Arthur all discover themselves surrounded by a love so inclusive and abiding that it seems to embrace every aspect of the American Dream that their celebration of the country’s liberty appears to symbolize. Why then, does all of this somehow ring hollow? Why does O’Neill’s comic vision of the world not quite convince one as does his otherwise tragic outlook?

     Of course, as I have previously written, there are also dark shadows that lie over works such as The Music Man and Meet Me in St. Louis as well. Both are works in which we realize reality is being transformed at the very moment it is hugged into being. These worlds no longer exist—and perhaps never did, except in our collective wishful thinking.

     Rather than featuring the realism that O’Neill’s detailed plotting seems to require, scenic designer Ralph Funicello transforms this work into a kind a gauzy fantasy play with scrims, silhouetted figures, and stark evocations of space (particularly in the beachside, moonlit meeting of Arthur and Muriel). Only at the dinner table does the family fully come into full realistic perspective, which, because of various events—including the family maid’s clumsy attempts at serving and Sid’s comic acrobatics—the children are determined to and sometimes encouraged to abandon. From the very first scene the youngest son, Tommy escapes the family circle to play with his fireworks. And soon after his elder sister, Mildred (Christina Liang) is sent away to lead him into the backyard. Others gradually move away from this realist “hearth” as well, with only Arthur left at table, he having already traveled thousands of miles away through his intense involvement with his book.

     In Funicello’s beautiful set, most of the family members sit out their familial encounters in isolated stations upon couches and chairs, or, in Arthur’s and Richard’s cases, in concerted escapes from family life, rather than remaining together as a unit. In short, the family members, despite their deep love and communal values, are almost always moving away and apart. The men plan to go to their annual male picnic, while the women assent to remain at home—only too delighted to be invited on a morning drive, one of the few times they are included in the male activities until the very end of the play. Although Sid has invited Lily to the evening fireworks, his drunkenness destroys their plans.

     If O’Neill’s play represents such an idealized picture of family life, accordingly, why does this family so seldom act as a unit?

     In part, of course, the symbolic communality is a myth. If O’Neill’s world appears to be so open-minded that it seems absolutely natural, as the A.T.C. theater production has, to apply color-blind casting, there are still, within the folds of the play itself, a series of deep segregating furrows between women and men, children and adults, siblings, neighbors, and even masters and servants.

     Some of the deepest of these oppositions are revealed in Nat’s ineffectual attempt to explain to his son Arthur, the facts of life. In this comic, yet quite shocking speech he attempts to explain the differences, as O’Neill might describe them, between “pure” women with whom one should not have out-of-marriage sex and “tarts,” women who, Nat declares, have existed since time immemorial to service men who need sexual release. In so dividing the opposite sex into two, Nat also reveals some of the differences between him and his wife. And, later, together, they even quip of their own intellectual perceptions of one another, as well as their expectations for their gifted son.

    Even though they both agree that he will be “great,” we see that Arthur may still have some very hard times ahead, despite his sensation at play’s end that “all’s right with the world.” Surely, given his brother’s taunts, he will have to face some difficult hazing and unpleasant adventures when he attends Yale next year. Will Muriel truly wait for him to graduate? The events of this play occur in 1906, and a few years after Arthur graduates, he most certainly will discover himself serving in World War I. It is clear, that long before graduation, he will learn facts (that Wilde was not, for example, tried for bigamy) that will change his idealized conceptions.

     Will Lily grow more bitter, Sid more self-mocking and lost? Will the seemingly open-minded world around the Miller family continue to be so or turn, as it appears the town might, to the prejudiced narrow mindedness of townsmen like David McComber?

     O’Neill obviously provides no answers and does not even bother to ask some of these questions. But they are there, nonetheless, casting shadows over the dream-like end of this playwright’s comic masterwork. The characters, after all, are sitting in the moonlight, not standing in the sun.

 

San Francisco, October 25, 2015

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (October 2015).

Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone | The Book of Mormon / 2017

look to the rainbow: a post-mortem

by Douglas Messerli

 

Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone (book, music, and lyrics) The Book of Mormon / 2011, the performance I saw with Howard Fox was in Los Angeles, The Pantages Theatre, at the matinee on Thursday, July 6, 2017.

 

Well, now I’ve gone and done it! For years since its 2011 Broadway opening, I’ve studiously averted my gaze to save me from angrily pounding out my keystrokes on the hide of a musical I knew I would probably not like, The Book of Mormon.

 

     It’s not that I had any aversion to musical parodies of beliefs—I’m openly a non-believer of all religions—and certainly, given what I’d previously read about Mormonism, it appears to deserve some of the mockery of Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone’s sweet assault. Their music and lyrics I’d heard from the South Park musicals and Q Street (I did not see these works, nor the Disney film Finding Nemo; but through Tony broadcasts and other sources, I’d heard several numbers) seemed, if not exactly glorious, nonetheless, full of puckish wit and pleasing to the ear—certainly a step-above the three-note choruses of some far more grandiose Broadway musicals which had become run-away hits. I knew the cast, filled with young and handsome Mormon missionaries and American black actors pretending to be illiterate Africans, at the very least, would sing pleasingly and dance up a storm. And even though I feared that the collusion of Mormonism and Ugandan natives would inevitably lead to racist situations, who was I, who as a child had even imagined and attempted to compose a musical about missionaries in the Congo set in the year of that country’s independence (see My Year 2011), to dismiss such an encounter.

      As a long-time lover and observer of the Broadway musical theater, perhaps I owed it to myself, I inwardly argued, to take in a musical that had received almost universal acclaim by critics and was beloved by its audiences. Even if I’d hated the entire idea of Cats (while enjoying a couple of its musical numbers), couldn’t bear to hear another bellowing chorus of Les Misérables (I eventually saw the movie), and had detested the righteous screaming British girls of Matilda, why was I behaving like such a curmudgeon over this seemingly infectious, irreverent confection. After all, if even the Church of the Latter Day Saints could embrace the work—wittily advertising their Book of Mormon in a Playbill ad by saying: “Our version is sliiiightly different. The musical is entertaining. The book? It’s life changing”—what right did I have to be so utterly standoffish?  

     What was I so afraid of in encountering in this belovèd American satire that I couldn’t even spend a few hours in its company? Some people have always described me as a slightly different kind of moral prig (this despite my constant embracement of what many in this culture might describe as utterly immoral artistic artifacts and behavior). Maybe I was a variation of a prig. If most all of the critics and audiences had had a great time at The Book of Mormon—all around us in the Pantages production I finally saw, other attendees were telling others that they’d seen the musical several times—what was my problem?

      The problem, I now realize, concerned my fears of writing the very review you’re about to read. And for that very reason, put it aside if you don’t care about the critical commentary I’m about to unleash. I am not trying to convince anyone about anything. I finally broke down and asked Howard to attend the musical with me when orchestra tickets were offered for a couple of days at only $49—this was, after all, the production’s 2nd or 3rd trip to Los Angeles—and the sold-out audience was entirely entranced, clapping enthusiastically after each number, laughing out-loud, and, of course, giving the entire production a standing ovation. They all seemed to have so much fun, I feel kind of embarrassed by some of my contradictory comments. If I seem informed or intelligent, please forgive me; I’d rather enjoyed this well-meaning satire the way everyone else around me did.

       So, big deal that this isn’t truly a musical, the way, say, all the Rodgers and Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, Lerner and Lowe, Bock and Harnick, or even the looser constructed works of Kander and Ebb were. Nor, is this a purposely genre-bending work in the tradition of Stephen Sondheim.  The Book of the Mormon harks back to an earlier time when, even as in some Cole Porter works, musicals were perceived as extended reviews, one song loosely connected to another with very brief verbal, interlinking skits. The songs, unlike in Oklahoma! or the even more fine-tuned My Fair Lady, are not emotional expressions of plot, but are themselves presented as plot, despite the difficulty of summarizing events in stanzas of basically rhymed couplets; the lyricists here use internal rhyme as well. 

     In her wonderful one-person review, At Liberty, Elaine Stritch recalls just such a production, Angels in the Wings, 70 years ago, where, after having only a speaking role, she was “awarded” a song, “Civilization,” which is not so very different from this musical’s  "Sal Tlay Ka Siti," sung by the character Nabulungi (Myha’la Herrold)—except for the important difference that Stritch’s native figure fears civilization and “wants to stay,” while Nabulungi most definitely wants to go:

 

                              I can imagine what it must be like

                              This perfect, happy place

                              I’ll bet the goat-meat there is plentiful

                              And they have vitamin injections by the case

                              The war-lords there are friendly

                              They help you cross the street

                              And there’s a Red Cross on every corner

                              With all the flour you can eat

 

     Part of the difference between the two is simply the changes in native societies over those 70 years. The Uganda in which Nabulungi lives is filled with violence, AIDS, female genital mutilation, famine, and other detriments to survival, to which the white intruders here appear to offer alternatives. But to the Congo native who Stritch played, even with its obvious racist attitudes—yet far less so that Nabulungi’s delusions—things were better in her world than civilization had to offer:

 

So bongo, bongo, bongo, I don't want to leave the

    congo, oh no no no no no

Bingo, bangle, bungle, I'm so happy in the jungle,

     I refuse to go

Don't want no bright lights, false teeth, doorbells,

     landlords, I make it clear

 (That no matter how they coax him) I'll stay

     right here

 

      However, I’m not yet talking about The Book of Mormon’s racist attitudes (I’ll come to that later), but about its structure. Like the review in which Stritch played in 1947, The Book of Mormon is a piecemeal affair. The story about the conflicts between Mormon missionaries and the small village members in Uganda is stitched together with songs that often times have utterly no relationship to the overall story or to one another. What does “You and Me (But Mostly Me),” sung by the self-centric Elder Price (Gabe Gibbs), and his wonderful tribute to his childhood memories of “Orlando” in the second act, have to do with the actual story except to point to his personal fantasies and a world outside of which the musical setting exists? Even his “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream”—one of the best numbers of the show, if only because of its costumes by Ann Roth—is a psychological portrait of the central character that has little to do with the overall plot structure, and offers very little connection to the work’s other characters, except for a delightful quip by another missionary, Elder McKinley (PJ Adzima) who, after discerning that Price has had a “hell dream,” probingly asks” “Was I in it?” That’s about as deep as plot gets in this musical.

 

      I don’t really mind the review structure. Even though as early as 1927 Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern had shown theater audiences in Show Boat that music and plot could be deeply connected, numerous major practitioners of musical theater, from George M. Cohan to George Gershwin (in Of Thee I Sing and several earlier and later musicals), along with Cole Porter, and numerous others, still preferred the revue structure, the songs dominating any plot connections that the librettist or book writer had woven into their works. I love Porter’s Anything Goes despite the fact that its overall story whips up a very daffy fantasy. With the witty songs by Porter, does it really matter? Irving Berlin’s music was interwoven into all sorts of silly Broadway and film illusions where plot was certainly secondary to the music.

      The problem, ultimately, is not that this work is simply a revue, but that it is almost a kind of “Forbidden Broadway” version of a revue, one of those off-Broadway shows that beautifully mock Broadway tropes. The latest in this tradition is the hit, Spamilton, making loving fun of the new hit Hamilton. In The Book of Mormon we see these satiric forces at work it its references to the musical Annie, replacing the notion of “Tomorrow” with “Latter;” and the musical The Sound of Music, particularly with the issue of “what to do we do with a problem” like Andy (Connor Pierson). Most importantly, obviously, is the complete pastiche of the famed “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” performance in Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s The King and I, mocked in the long Ugandan villagers’ production of their own version of Mormon history of “Joseph Smith American Moses.” And there are other inside jokes in the dancing as well as the songs (the missionaries often appear to be mocking Bob Fosse numbers). There is something absolutely lovely about this musical’s parodies of these other American classics; but, one has to wonder, is this simply another version of “Forbidden Broadway” or a really new significant American musical work?

       I might equally have loved The Book of Mormon, of course, if its songs to which the almost non-existent story was attached, were actually memorable. But most of these numbers, I am afraid, are simply ditties, even if some of them are quite clever; none of them are truly memorable offerings to the history of Broadway song library. A couple of them get quite close to actual musical significance, particularly in the second act’s “I Believe,” sung by Gibbs, where in the musical actually awakens, for a few moments, from its over-amplified loud declarations into an actual proclamation of identity:

 

I believe that the Lord God created the universe

I believe that he sent his only son to die for my sins

And I believe that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America

I am a Mormon

And a Mormon just believes

 

You cannot just believe part-way, you have to believe in it all

My problem was doubting the Lord's will, instead of standing tall

I can't allow myself to have any doubt, it's time to set my worries free

Time to show the world what Elder Price is about, and share the power inside of me

 

I believe that God has a plan for all of us

I believe that plan involves me getting my own planet

And I believe that the current President of the Church, Thomas Monson, speaks directly to God

I am a Mormon

And, dang it, a Mormon just believes (a Mormon just believes)

 

    But even here, obviously, the satiric intent of the song drips so strongly upon the excited proclamations of the singer, that it diminishes the performance of the character himself. It is a kind of mockery without true feeling.

      Compare this, for example, with the similarly ridiculous song of belief of Finian’s Rainbow sung by Finian’s daughter, Sharon, in the equally ludicrous musical by E. Y. Harburg, Fred Saidy, and Burton Lane (the composer):

 

 Look, look, look to the rainbow

 Follow it over the hill and the stream

 Look, look, look to the rainbow

 Follow the fellow who follows a dream

 

 So I bundled me heart and I roamed the world free

 To the east with the lark, to the west with the sea

 And I've searched all the earth and I've scanned all the skies

 But I found it at last in me own true love's eyes

 

 Look, look, look to the rainbow

 Follow it over the hill and stream

 Look, look, look to the rainbow

 Follow the fellow who follows a dream

 

 Follow, the fellow, follow, the fellow

 Follow, the fellow who follows a dream

 

    The sentiment, sung by an identifiable Irish outsider, is similar to the Mormon musical, but the lyrics point outward to something else—another possibility, a new world viewed through the eyes of another. And, admittedly, Burton Lane’s music cannot be compared with the often tune-dead songs of Parker, Lopez, and Stone.

    Finian’s Rainbow is also a political and social satire, making fun of both racial attitudes and religious sensibilities, including a figure as improbable (Og, the leprechaun) as The Book of Mormon’s hobbits, Darth Vader, and Yoda, which the impulsive liar Edler Arnold Cunnigham incorporates into his Mormon teachings. Finian, also, is an absolute liar. If the Mormon missionaries of The Book of Mormon suddenly seem to discover—in an obvious satirical spoof of their intentions—that “I Am Africa,” in the 1947 musical (the same year as the Stritch review), a bigoted Senator of the older Lane and Harburg musical is actually turned black and must live with the consequences on his own racist terms. The natives in that musical—in this case poor Southern farm workers—also dream of better times in “That Great Come-and-Get-It Day,” and awaken to the fact that their dreams, just as the Ugandan villagers perceive, have all been a metaphor for what might really have happened. Perhaps, without even admitting it, The Book of Mormon has roots in this kind of fantastical musical theater.

     The Book of Mormon, accordingly, has Broadway roots, which might have allowed it to truly become the kind of classic that many proclaim it to be. The problem is that its writers don’t truly know how to control their satire to focus on what they might truly want to say. Finian’s Rainbow was a true socialist and anti-racist argument, while The Book of Mormon has no political or broad social aspirations.

     These Mormon missionaries seem, in large part, to be participating in a gay satire of the figures that exist—I’m sorry to report to the mostly heterosexual, family audience I encountered at the Pantages—on a lot of gay porno sites. There are number of such sites that present just such missionaries ringing the bells (celebrated in the musical’s first song, “Hello”) who encounter a seemingly willing believer who quickly seduces the innocent Mormon boys into his bed. (Perhaps there are heterosexual variants of which I’m unaware.)

     The musical actually makes a great deal of this metaphor, reinforcing the idea that the missionaries are sent out with “companions” with whom they are “attached” for at least two years. In this kind of strange “marriage,” the men often share a bed, and, at least in the case of the awkward and much unloved Elder Arnold Cunningham (Pierson), results in a relationship consummated through a great deal of hand-on-hand touching (the original Broadway Cunningham, Josh Gad, played just such a role in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast). Most of the original missionaries, who have lived long in Uganda without finding a single person to be converted, seem to have formed a kind of “underground” league with their leader, an obvious gay man, Elder McKinley, that clearly reminds one of the gay community of the earlier decades wherein, with their continually high-pitched, often shrieking voices the necessarily closeted men lived, nightly or weekly celebrating in an almost kind of gay hysteria, the comraderie—much like the one expressed in this musical’s number, “Turn It Off,” which might almost be a theme song for gay men seemingly trapped for life in the closet.

      As a gay man, I’m fascinated by this thematic, which, since it’s not very hidden, must be quite apparent to the lovingly diverse audiences who embrace this musical every afternoon and evening. I should delight in this fact, and the openness with which that the musical’s audiences seem to gladly accept it. I wonder, since the writers are reported to have interviewed several young returned Mormon missionaries as they developed the musical, just how much truth this structural element projects. I’m not sure I really want to know. As my friend Charles Bernstein suggested, when he first saw this work on Broadway, it all seems a bit surrealistic.

      It’s really not the issue, of course; the writers chose to make these overlaying gay insinuations, and even when their musical, for brief periods of times, imagines heterosexual relationships, as in Cunningham’s contemplation of baptizing his new convert, Nabulungi (who throughout the work he describes in various racially-motivated names: “Oreo,” Nutrena, etc. etc.) is wrapped up in sexual language and imagination.

      These Mormons, whether gay innocents or, possibly, male sexual aggressors, are still the controllers of the situation, despite their personal sense of inadequacy. Given my own white male social prerogatives, I will not attempt to judge this musical on racial grounds. Others, such as Cheryl Thompson and Kate Wilson have done so. Yet it does appear to me, as a first-time observer, that any musical that presents its black figures to be completely entranced by the Mormon religion, and willing, as in the musical’s last number suggests, not only to embrace a new book “of Arnold,” but to go door to door (in a reprise of “Welcome”) to promote their new religion, are not basically free-thinking beings. Apparently, they have now been complexly “saved” and are mentally controlled by their white (now “African-thinking”) visitor/intruders. Are Ugandans really so simple minded? I cannot imagine the reality that this musical dares to.

      Finally, however, I think the musical’s largest failure lies in its complete acceptance of religion as a kind of cynical thinking: whatever works to help individuals is more important than any true spiritual experience. The “Book of Arnold”—not only with its lies, but its free-spirited sci-fi incorporations—is just as good as The Book of Mormon, or, at least, it doesn’t matter, as long as it makes for better human communication.

     I might second that were it not for this new religion’s seemingly easy links with something like the fictional writings of Ron L. Hubbard, the creator of Scientology, than with any coherent set of religious beliefs. The idea that anything is good if it can bring people together, I fear, is as cynical, in the end, as Trump’s philosophy of giving believers what they want: himself, like Arnold, a congenital liar who can easily convince anyone of what he and others temporarily believe. Is the confused and unintelligent Andy really any different, in the end, from our current president?

     Since I don’t believe, some may wonder why I should even care about these issues. But, strangely enough, particularly since I don’t believe, I very much do care. Any perceived savior of the people, I am afraid, is a very dangerous obstruction to individual thinking. I suppose those ringing doorbells at the end might symbolize an entire community of individuals trying to reach out to one another, but I fear what may be at the other end. Hello, Darth Vader is calling you! Sorry, I’m not at home!

      In closing, I am somewhat embarrassed at having attempted to kill a sparrow with an anvil or, at least, a cleaver. There were moments when this sparrow of a musical actually moved me, and, admittedly, I was almost moved to tears. As I’ve often mentioned, when I am truly moved by musicals, the tears flow endlessly. Let the sparrow fly away! Let the audiences enjoy their entertainments. And both Howard and I noted that the excellent orchestra let loose, as the patrons were leaving the theater, in a kind of rock/jazz rendition of the score that might have energized this work had it been included.

     But I do pray that we think about what these entertainments are truly trying to say. Not any belief, surely, is a good as any other. And for all the laughs on Broadway, Hollywood Boulevard, or any other major performative space, there may be whimpers of the true believer’s sacrifice—whatever that belief may be. I’ll take the rainbow any day over the doorbell’s ring to convince me of something I can’t truly believe in. And I can only answer, if it rings, “Please, leave me alone, you might not want to hear what I need to say.” I was silent about this work for so many years with very good reason.”

 

Los Angeles, July 7, 2017

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (July 2017).