Jule Styne, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim | Gypsy / 2008

a necessary vacuum

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jule Styne (music), Arthur Laurents (book), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) Gypsy / New York, St. James Theatre / the performance I saw was on the evening of May 10, 2008

 

My brief summary of the plot of Gypsy in the essay above clouds the fact that it is nearly impossible to say anything coherent about this musical. Words seem out of place in a work centered around such a stock figure as this notorious “stage mother.” Better to just sit back and watch this monster (a word taken from the Latin, meaning “to show”) than to attempt to describe what one is being shown.

     Most of the women who have played this role—Ethel Merman, Rosalind Russell, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bette Midler, and, in the recent production I attended, Patti LuPone—had long played powerful women before they attempted the role (Bernadette Peters is perhaps the exception). For Mama Rose is the kind of dominating woman who, before the operetta is over (and I think of this American musical as having more links to opera than many other musical works), must devour nearly all the other characters on stage, even the audience itself, to get the attention she craves. Ultimately, these performers, like full force hurricanes, leave little in their paths except the shy, naked girl who has no choice but to retreat into the mind she has never been permitted to develop.

      The audience can do little but sit in stony silence or madly applaud! As if witnessing the death dance of the mad Medea or the passionate self-willed rape of Salome, one recognizes Rose’s last long screed (“Rose’s Turn”)—performed supposedly in an empty theater where we sit as voyeurs—as something nearly unbearable to watch. Her daughter’s lame response, “You could have been great, mama,” is a death knell to this woman born too early and come to performance too late. “Could have, would have,” Rose bites back, knowing that despite all the living she has done vicariously through her daughters, she stands alone on the stage, bowing to an imaginary audience. The fact that we sit there, madly applauding her desperate lament, only reiterates the fact that, within the drama itself, she faces the silence of death.

 

    Yet, as I title the next essay, “What a way to go!” Despite her utter selfishness, Rose has also been utterly, unintentionally selfless, destroying her children and lover at the very moment of building their characters into the kind of strong-willed pioneer woman that she herself is. Gypsy Rose Lee may seek all of her life for the love her mother was unable to provide, but, as she herself admits, she will now live her life by herself in her own manner. Her new identity has transformed the poor little untalented girl that once stood behind it.

     What is remarkable about Patti LuPone’s substantial performance, particularly when she opens her mouth in song, is that in her characterization of Rose we understand, perhaps for the first time, that she was able to hold on to her children and agent-lover Herbie for so long because she was not only willful, powerful, and deter-mined woman, but a siren, a beautiful female who could lure any man, woman, child into her clutches far better than Gypsy will ever be able to seduce her male audiences. It is no accident that Gypsy’s allurement lies in her being a refined lady who stands at a remove from the audience she entertains, an unattainable goddess of love. For Rose, contrarily, is the last of the red hot mammas, a course, down to earth, sexual predator who is nearly impossible to resist. Perhaps only the Midler performance came close to this.

     I never saw the Ethel Merman production, but after seeing this version of the musical play, it now seems hard to imagine such a rock of flesh as having been able to entice anyone to do anything, let alone perform loony amateur skits, as Baby June and Louise did, year after year. One understands in LuPone’s performance why Herbie can “never get away” from her, staying on until the last shred of human decency is dropped, like Gypsy’s long white gloves.

 

New York, May 11, 2008

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (June 2008).

 

Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti, J. F. A. Bayard, and J. H. Venoy de Saint-Georges | La fille du Régiment / 2019

marie gets her man and her gun

by Douglas Messerli

 

Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (composer), J. F. A. Bayard and J. H. Venoy de Saint-Georges (libretto) La fille du Régiment / the production Howard Fox and I saw of the Met HD Live presentation was on Saturday, March 2, 2019

 

Even the often traditionalist Metropolitan Opera—although far less conservative over the past many years under the guidance of Peter Gelb—recognizes when it has an innovative comic hit, as they do in this year’s production of La fille du Régiment, directed by the wonderous “child-like” Laurent Pelly (who also did the costumes) and conducted by the performer-behind-the-baton Enrique Mazzola. The Met itself celebrated the near endless ovations at opera’s end with a convention-like confetti-spray of paper placards each saying “bravo” and “brava.” And flowers I haven’t seen since the Maria Callas days.

       And then there was the absolutely glorious singing of the two leads, South Africa’s Pretty Yende (as Marie) and Javier Camarena (as Tonio), who beautifully belts out 9 high C’s in his famous aria “Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête!" The Met has again loosened up its previous ban on encores, even encouraging the standing-up applause, while Camarena, tears flowing from his eyes in appreciation, goes through those high C’s all over again, making it almost impossible for audience to have clear eyes. Asked in an intermission discussion how he is able to achieve that, the rather modest Camarena simply explained that when you’re rehearsing such a role you sing those high C’s far more often, until your voice becomes raw.

     Perhaps the great Peruvian-born singer Juan Diego Flórez (who Howard saw in another production of this opera) is just as talented, but there is something about the slightly chubby Camarena’s excited possibility of marrying this obviously black woman that says so much about great theater’s ability to transform our visions. These two characters prove the term, “the willing suspension of disbelief,” as both rather handsome individuals turn themselves through their singing into the beauteous creatures represented in the libretto of J. F. A. Bayard and J. H. Venoy de Saint-Georges.

     Yende might have been equally applauded for her “Il faut parir, mes bons compagnons d’armes” and, in Act II, her lovely lament of having to leave all she has loved behind.

      As if the joys of these two lovers were not enough, we have before us the always beloved Stephanie Blythe as the slightly selfish and oafish Marquise of Berkenfield (more of a speaking role than a singing one, which, given Blythe’s soaring voice, is a bit disappointing), Maurizio Muraro (as Sulpice)—who it was announced was suffering from a cold the day we saw the H.D. live-video transmission, but who seemed still to carry his role to near-perfection—and  then, as if allowing us a spicy topping, presenting actress Kathleen Turner in the entirely-speaking role of the proud Duchess of Krakenthorp, declaring her frustrations alternately in rather American accented French and English.

 

    The very athletically-conceived first act, and the mockingly artificiality of Pelly’s vision of Act II with the servant’s molding themselves to the walls and furniture they are cleaning, made for great fun. And then, in Act 1 there was Yende’s sudden surprise, when, upon perceiving her confused love for Tonio, she mutters unintelligible words—in this case spoken entirely in the language of the Zulus, including the languages noted clicks. This production seemed to contain nearly everything one needed to become a kind of classic vision of the Donizetti opera.

      Yes, some of this is simply silly and, particularly in Act II, a bit over-the-top. But it’s fun always. This is the kind of opera to which anyone might bring their children or grandchildren—although on the rainy day we saw it, the movie-theater audience was made-up, once more, of grey-white-purple haired women and their husbands, many of whom came armed with their walkers. We, alas, are not far from those descriptions. Although I know the Met cameras must seek them out in their before curtain coverage, there seems to be many younger people attending the New York opera house itself. Opera desperately needs those young people!

      And then there is this strange tale about a young abandoned child adopted, evidently without any abuse, by an entire military unit of lusty young men. She grows up virtually as an indentured servant, endlessly washing and cleaning their underwear and cooking their meals. Marie might as easily be described as a kind of slave, a Cinderella who is never invited to the ball. 

      Yet being the “daughter” of an entire military unit, she is also allowed a great deal of freedom, unforced to play the proper young woman, even encouraged to be an independent-thinking tom-boy, who openly grumbles and rebels about anything she doesn’t like. If she cheerily accepts her endless washing, ironing, and potato-peeling duties, she perceives herself also as a kind of Joan of Arc, a military woman working alongside of these men to help France, singing “Salut à la France” to rile up their patriotic fervor that might see them on to war with the terrified peasants of Tyrolean Italy. 

    She is a wild thing, ready at any moment to carry a gun—a kind of Annie Oakley of the day shocked suddenly into love by the equally radical Tonio, a milder Wild Bill Hitchcock who, as a Tyrolean, dares not only to enter enemy territory in search of his love, but to join up with them, later becoming a kind of French hero.

      Once the local Tyrolean Marquise, really a kind of wealthy bourgeoise, perceives Marie as being the long-lost daughter of her sister and dresses her up in a new gown while attempting to teach the girl proper French and Italian melodies and manners, Yende really does remind one a bit of Doris Day’s Oakley, all dressed up to entice her “Wild Bill” Tony. You might almost expect them to break into a chorus of “I Can Do Anything Better Than You.” One might even describe the 9 high C’s of Tonio in Act I as a kind of “I can outdo you” in reaction to Marie’s infectious singing.

       In fact, Marie’s Tonio rides in to save her, this time in a absurdly anachronistic machine-gun tank to rescue her from the dead society (which almost reminded of the audience I describe above) into which she is being forced to marry.

      We know this gutsy young girl will never be able to survive as the wife of the conveniently absent son (like Tonio, a tenor playing at the Metropolitan) of the Duchess of Krakenthorp; yet when the Marquise suddenly admits to Sulpice that she, in fact, is the mother of Marie, the girl, unwilling, agrees to sign the marriage certificate.

    Suddenly, the memory of her youthful sexual follies almost rejuvenates the Marquise, as she declares that Marie should marry the man her daughter loves instead of marrying into the dead world of her own memories of her beloved Robert.

      It is somewhat amazingly, accordingly, that a 17th century Opéra comique might speak so strongly about feminist aspirations, military incompetence, and patriarchal and matriarchal demands that speak to our own time. In a far more comic manner, this strong woman reminds us of more tragic women of opera such as Brünhilde, Carmen, Salome, Electra, Princess Turandot, and so very many others who attempted, often successfully but more often forced into death, to rebel against patriarchal domination. Marie gets her man and her gun; she can now keep her wild identity while swooning into the arms of her soldier lover.

 

Los Angeles, March 5, 2019

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

Joe Masteroff, Sheldon Harnick, and Jerry Bock | She Loves Me / 1994

writing tenderly

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joe Masteroff (book, based on the play by Miklos Laszlo), Sheldon Harnick (lyrics), Jerry Bock (music) / She Loves Me / New York, Eugene O’Neill Theatre, 1963 / revival New York, Criterion Center Stage Right, 1993, transferred to the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 1994.

 

Of all the versions of Miklos Laszlo’s play Parfumerie, my favorite is the musical She Loves Me. I did not see the original 1963 Broadway version, but even today I feel like I must have been there, since soon after its opening I bought the stereo recording and played it so many times that it lost most of its sound, forcing me buy a second copy. I also own a CD version, even today recalling the lyrics of nearly every one of its songs, my favorites among them being “Sounds While Selling,” “Tonight at Eight,” “Will He Like Me?” “Ice Cream,” and “She Loves Me.” But there are also charming lesser pieces: the angry song of rejection sung by the character Ilona (the wonderful Barbara Baxley), “I Resolve,” her tale of true love in “A Trip to the Library,” and the sarcastic goodbye to the Budapest shop and its workers by the oily charmer, Stephen Kodaly (Jack Cassidy), “Grand Knowing You.” And even the seemingly ridiculous lyrics of “Where’s My Shoe?” work wonderfully. As the composers Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick wrote of this work: “We’ve never written so tenderly before”—and, I would argue, never again.

     I still recall the day I first heard of the musical, when on the television show To Tell the Truth Peggy Cass mentioned that she had attended it a night earlier, and encouraged everyone to see it. Given its fairly short, 302 performances, obviously not all viewers ran to the Eugene O’Neill Theater, where it was playing—but it made a believer out of me.

      I was utterly transformed by the performance of Barbara Cook, who I had already fallen in love with through her singing in The Music Man and Candide. To hear her sing “No More Candy”—as she attempts to sell the “Ochi Chërnye”-playing music box by pretending it is a container for candy that plays to remind its owners that they have had too much to eat—and her self-doubting paean to love, “Will He Like Me?” are startlingly beautiful Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick songs that can hardly be matched. Indeed She Loves Me, in my estimation, is a far better musical than their other hits, which include Fiddler on the Roof. Daniel Massey’s original renditions of “Tonight at Eight” and “She Loves Me” are splendid ballads of hopeful paradise. And who couldn’t love Nathaniel Frey’s intentionally unintrusive yet loving friend? Of all the delivery boys—in this version called Arpad—Ralph Williams is clearly the most appealing, particularly when he sings “Try Me.”

 

     Not only does the music and dance lighten up the darker play and film version, but give the work the feel of the merriment of Christmas season with which ends. Georg Nowack (Massey) is far more loveable in the musical than James Stewart is in the movie, and in his visits to the sick Amalia his refusal to tell her that she is his unknown penpal makes far more sense. Even though Ludwig Donath fires Georg, believing he is having an affair with his wife, the musical version tempers the antagonism between them, allowing Donath to bring greater warmth to his role than in the play and movie, by warmly recalling “Days Gone By.”  And the more extended Gypsy café scene, replete with both a romantic and tragic tango, intensifies Amalia’s self-doubt and makes her an even more likable figure than was Margaret Sullivan’s Klara. Cassidy won a Tony Award for his performance.    

      So too did leading actor Boyd Gaines, playing Georg in the 1994 Roundabout Theater revival, a musical I did see at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in New York. That production featured Judy Kuhn as Amalia, Sally Mayes as Ilona, Howard McGillin as Kodaly, Lee Wilkof as Ladislav, Brad Kane as Arpad, and Louis Zorich as Maraczek. I loved it, although it would have been impossible to match, to my way of thinking, the original. The revival lasted only a few more performances than the original, 354, but it also won the Drama Desk Award for “Outstanding Revival” and “Outstanding Actor in a Musical” (again the charming Gaines). 

       This beloved musical has had a special role, so it seems, in my life, representing one of the most cherished works of my musical theater experiences. I believe I describe somewhere in the My Year volumes that upon my first visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus (after a bus ride from Milwaukee in 1966, while I was still a freshman at that University campus) I wandered through the sprawling university grounds far away from the humanities-based edifices to the agricultural part of the school, where I came upon a large tent. Quietly entering it from the back, I quickly perceived it as a rehearsal for a performance of this gem (I later discovered that the agricultural school sent amateur performances of their plays throughout the state), and sat in stillness through it until someone noticed me and asked what I was doing there. “Just watching this wonderful work,” I shot back. I was allowed to stay, and I realized, almost immediately, that I just had to transfer to the Madison campus, which I joyfully did soon after. Did the farmers and small-town audiences who got to see this musical, enjoy it half as much as I? I’d like to think so, perhaps sweeping up some young boy like I had been in Iowa into the magical arms of theater and opera.

 

Los Angeles, January 16, 2014

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2014).

Mac Wellman | A Murder of Crows / 1992

a linguistic fantasia

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mac Wellman A Murder of Crows / New York, Primary Stages, April 22, 1992

Without complaining about the very thing I’ve determined to do, I still have to admit I feel a bit daunted about writing on Mac Wellman’s unforgettable play, Murder of Crows. Without any true plot, you might describe this work as more of a linguistic fantasia than a drama peopled with interrelating characters. Although family is vaguely at the center of this play, all is more than slightly askew, as the very set suggests, where he stands a porch without a house attached: “We lost the house,” suggests Nella (Anne O’Sullivan) glibly tossing out one of the hundreds of American vernacular terms with which this work engages.

      I first saw this play at Primary stages in late April 1992, and I published it, along with the second of Wellman’s so-called “Crowtet” on my Sun & Moon Press two years later; I reprinted that volume through my Green Integer imprint in 2000, adding the second volume, containing the last two “Crowtet” plays, in 2003. So, I obviously have great affection for and intimate knowledge of the play. Yet it has taken me all this time to attempt to write about it, and I still find it more experiential than explicable.

      Let me just suggest that although the characters are slightly related—Susannah (Jan Leslie Harding) and her mother Nella, along with their son Andy (the handsome Reed Birney, who stands all in gold throughout as a kind of lawn ornament) having come to live with Nella’s brother Howard (William Mesnik) and his unbelievably lucky and mean-hearted wife, Georgia (Lauren Hamilton)—it might be best to think of their interrelationships more as a series of monologues that each satirizes various aspects of contemporary American culture.

      Wellman’s play is set someone in Midwest (he grew up in Ohio) near a vast “hellacious grease pit” and a nearby reactor which makes the rivers “look like bubble baths, and the air’s all mustardy.” Her husband, Raymond (Stephen Mellor) has evidently been drowned in the pit, and all they have is a shoe left. With feet of different sizes and a dislocated face, Nella is clearly a dependent, in need not only of the begrudging housing (in a chicken coop) that her relatives have provided her and her daughter, but in need of inspirational reading matter and spiritual help. She is, in short, a representative of all in American life that is hated, a woman who has been bypassed by any element of the “American dream.” Although her brother Howard is somewhat sympathetic, he himself is impatient with his sister, and particularly her dreamy daughter, whose major focus seems to be a “weather change”:

 

                      Susannah: The weather is changing, the weather

                                        is changing for sure, I can smell it.

                                        The weather has got a whole wheelbarrow

                                        full of surprises up its sleeve for us.

      Not only is she predicting, like a local Cassandra, a serious change in the climate—significant implications in the environmental ravaged worlds where many of Wellman’s plays take place—but a change of philosophical, spiritual, even metaphysical significance. For her, “The moment will come. Everything that is vertical will become horizontal,” Time will turn inside out. In part, of course, Susannah’s “strangeness,” as Howard describes it, is simply the desire of any young being for change. But the change she prophesies is also terrifying, particularly for the hidebound gold diggers whom Howard and his wife represent.

    The wife, Georgia, has not only broken the bank at Monte Carlo, one of the hundreds of clichés Wellman proudly spouts, but wins big weekly at their attendances at the local horse track, from which she brings home wheelbarrows full of money. If she can be said characterize the dream of all Americans, hooked on a system that promises enormous, accidental, and undeserved wealth, she, in her xenophobic hostility of anything outside what finds to be normal, experiences little happiness. Berating Raymond’s shoes and hats, for example, she snarls:

 
                                ……..Grotesque. Perverted

                                If it’s possible for a hat to be obscene, his

                                hats were obscene. I mean, They made you

                                think of things no sane person ought to think

                                of, ever. They were not good-looking American

                                hats, law-and-order type hats, or patriotic,

                                military hats, or socially eminent country

                                club or corporate hats.

 

Later in the play Howard and Nella reveal that their own strange attic-stored hats (fezzes) and clothes was a result of their having as children been gypsies (or pretending to be gypsies) who stole money from German tourists. Their real family name, so they claim, was Babaghanouj, their great grandfather having been a rug merchant from Istanbul named Nebuchanezzar. It all reminds one, a bit, of the patriotic, right-wing Eleanor Shaw Iselin from The Manchurian Candidate, who near film’s end is revealed to be a Communist set on taking over the US.

 

     It is almost inevitable, accordingly, that the shining gold statue, Andy, says nothing and does nothing throughout most of the play, since, as he briefly admits, the excitement aroused in him by bombing Iraq cities has taken him into a higher plain of being than any of the family members can comprehend.

     Like most American comedies, Wellman’s Murder of Crows, predictably ends happily as the dead father Raymond reappears, rising from his coffin, having, he admits, been living all these years with the Crows. As confused and mysteriously baffled as his daughter, he would go living with them, he vows, if he weren’t allergic to their feathers. Released from her earth-bound bondage by his sudden resurrection and her mother’s symbolic death as she retreats into the coffin the husband has left, Susannah discovers she is not at all allergic to their wings, and joins up with the busy crows, who, somewhat like the cartoon figures of Heckle and Jeckle, sit apart, at play’s end, discussing interminably deep and unanswerable philosophical issues:

 

                                     What if we are Type A entities.

                                     That is, what if we contextualize

                                     and explain the existences of

                                     others but cannot, on pain of

                                     infinite regress, be contextualized

                                     or explained ourselves?

 

    Yet, while these seemingly profound figures nicely close down Wellman’s hilarious look at the “State of the Onion,” it is important to remember that in other cultures, such as in Japan, crows represent ominous forces of evil for the human species. One can only wonder, accordingly, whether the author is suggesting that in both Andy and Susannah we have lost, as a people, our only dreamers to realms that have no effect on our daily lives. Never mind, hints the witty writer, that these crows “look more like mynas or parrots than real crows: ie., they’re fake crows.” In a world built of language anything is possible or nothing is.

      Beware: the forces hovering over the second play of Wellman’s quartet are Macaws.

 

Los Angeles, January 13, 2013

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

 

Martha Clarke | Garden of Earthly Delights / 2009

from a crawl into flight

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martha Clarke (director and choreographer) Garden of Earthly Delights, music by Richard Peaslee / Minetta Lane Theatre, New York City / the performance I saw was a matinee on January 17, 2009

Hieronymus Bosch's sixteenth century triptych of paradise, earthly delights, and hell is the source of Martha Clarke's dance performance first presented in New York in 1984 and revived in 1987 at the same theater in which I saw it this year, at the high-ceilinged Minetta Lane Theatre.

      Clarke's work however is only tangentially related to the Bosch painting, since its rich reds, greens, and blues are replaced in the performance with various shades of white and brown; only the sheer body stockings worn by the dancers, lending it a pinkish-like glow.

    And while Bosch presents us with three versions of what delight might signify: the paradisiacal serenity before the fall, the lusty play and abuse of the earthly world, and the dark and sadistic tortures of Hell, Clarke's work is more clearly inspired by a Puritan-like vision of reality, as she explores, through body and motion, mankind's transformation from animal being to gluttony, greed, lust, torture, war, and murder.

      One of the loveliest moments in a hour of many wondrous scenes occurs at the very beginning of the work, as the eleven dancers gracefully move forward on fingers and toes, a species not yet fully able or willing to stand erect. Yet soon, bearing branches in ritualistic gestures they come together as humans, in pairs and in small groupings, that predicts the inevitable fall from grace, Eve biting the apple and Adam both as the snake sensuously writhes between them.

     From the beginning of this revelation of flesh, I wished that Clarke had allowed her dancers to perform naked instead of being ensconced in the sickly flesh-colored body stockings that wipe out all but the general shapes of their handsome bodies. I say this out of no prurient interests—dozens of Broadway musicals and plays these days feature nudity—but am simply suggesting that the appearance of dancers such as Sophie Bortolussi, Daniel Clifton, General McArthur Hambrick, and Whitney A. Hunter seems an occasion to truly witness the delights of human flesh.

     In the second "triptych," the revelers have truly found "society," and are now dressed in Medieval peasant garb, one festooned in a codpiece. Accordingly, it is the earthly garden itself where Clarke most clearly explores both the pleasures and abuses of human sexuality. Here too she represents the "potato eaters," as a man seemingly swallows dozens of potatoes before vomiting up his dinner.

     Some figures gracefully dance while others imitate copulation. Priests (played by the musicians of Richard Peaslee's haunting score) attempt to control the various disruptions, including a few individuals who have suddenly gone aerial, flying in and out of the stage frame through pulleys and ropes. However, their attempt at order ultimately results in even greater torture—represented as the Spanish Inquisition—of these free-spirited souls, eventually chaos breaking out.

     In the final hellish spectacle almost all dancers—again sporting bodytights—take to the ropes, spinning almost out of control over the audience, tumbling head over heels high above us, who have become almost voyeurs of the human hell to which we are witness. It is terrifying—and liberating.

     By the work's end, we realize what miserable beasts our species has turned out to be, how spirituality and ritual have been converted into warfare and other acts of hate. As the audience turned to go, a woman in front of me commented: "Not a very encouraging portrait of our kind, is it?"

      Perhaps not. But what other earthly creature could take their bodies from a virtual crawl into flight?

 

Los Angeles, February 5, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2009).