World Theater, Opera, and Performance

Given its very strange story, it is probably pretty apparent why Lesser Samuels and Frank Loesser’s 1960 musical lasted only 97 performances. Set in a mythical town, Greenwillow, the eldest born of each generation of the Briggs family are forced to leave their loved ones and wives to “wander,” leaving their family members to care for one another until their father one day comes home. In some senses, this is a unstated dream of both heterosexual and homosexual men who need more time to discover themselves, and casting Anthony Perkins in the lead role of Gideon Briggs, heightens the gay subtheme, even though, in this case Gideon did not want to follow the family custom since he was in love with a local girl, Dorrie,

In any event, Perkins sang the work’s most powerful song, “Never Will I Marry,” with such soulfulness that it might almost be thought of as a lost gay anthem.

Never, never will I marry

Never, never will I wed

Born to wander solitary

Wide my world, narrow my bed

Never never never will I marry

Born to wander 'til I'm dead

The “narrow my bed” phrase is one of the most haunting moments of this lyric, which goes on to reiterate what might almost have been seen as a manifesto of gay life in the early 1960s, with its ranges from the baritone voice in the word “born,” to the tenor in the word “marry,” and Perkins’ final line aspiration of the word “dead.”

No burden to end

No conscience, no care

No memories to mourn

No turning, for I was

Born to wander solitary

Wide my world, narrow my bed

Never never never will I marry

Born to wander 'til I'm dead

Anthony Perkins and choreographer Grover Dale during the production of Greenwillow

Clearly, young Gideon, if he were to carry on the family tradition, has utterly no intention of returning, or “No turning,” as he puts it.

I have included two versions of this powerful song sung by Perkins, one from the original cast recording, with its brief and quite silly musical prelude, made in the same year that he was shooting Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and a second “Great Performances” series from 2013, clearly taken from a Tony broadcast of years earlier (which I saw), since Perkins died in 1992 of AIDS, after having had affairs over the years with Tab Hunter, Rock Hudson, Rudolph Nureyev, Stephen Sondheim, the dancer-choreographer Grover Dale, and, I have evidence to believe, with my dear friend, Robert Orr— before marrying, at age 41, photographer Berinthia "Berry" Berenson, with whom he had two sons.

What is utterly fascinating to me is that this clear anthem of the gay life was also recorded by a substantial number of women, including a jazz version by Nancy Wilson performing with Cannonball Adderley, Barbra Streisand, and Judy Garland, all versions of which I have also included in my list of video performances.

Los Angeles, August 10, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2017).

Wednesday, December 25, 2024

Jerry Bock Sheldon Harnick, and Joe Masteroff | "Will He Like Me?" from She Loves Me / 1963

my favorite musical theater songs: “will he like me?’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFCzkqCh3-I

Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) and Jerry Bock (music) / 1963

Performer: Barbara Cook from the original Broadway production

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AarSccJPVlU

Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) and Jerry Bock (music) / 1963

Performer: Laura Benanti, in the 2016 Broadway revival

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrENWITA6_U

Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) and Jerry Bock (music) / 1963

Performer: Audra McDonald, singing at the London Palladium / PBS Television

It’s more than haunting that at the very moment I was listening to the tapes above of Barbara Cook’s brilliant performance from the 1963 musical, one of my very favorites, of She Loves Me—for me almost a childhood icon, when at 16 I listened to the original Broadway cast recording that I had bought nearly every day (I wore the record out and, a few years later, bought a second copy)—Cook was already dead. I heard of her death only later in the day. And, yes, I admit, I cried a great deal.

Cook, after all, had been a significant figure, as I write elsewhere, for so many years in my life, from 1957 on, through her performances of my home-state’s The Music Man and Bernstein’s brilliant Candide through She Loves Me and into a new life (and a new body) in which Howard and I enjoyed her in, first gay bar cabarets, and later in beloved video productions of Follies and more immediate theatrical productions in Los Angeles in Westwood and Beverly Hills. Who couldn’t love that now overweight singer who performed nearly operatic feats while telling such wonderful tales of her own life? Cook was a legend, both on Broadway and later in cabaret and stage. She had it all—and she knew it. She had done everything, and done it so brilliantly that no one could do anything but love and admire her if you enjoyed the genres in which she had appeared.

She sang so many songs so brilliantly that it seems almost a sin to describe the pleading Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock ditty “She Loves Me” as the first of many works I will later describe coming from those incredible lungs. But her performance is so amazing that it is impossible to ignore it.

I recently listened to the same song, performed in a revival by the quite talented Laura Benanti, who I had first seen and was very impressed by in a revival of Gypsy and later enjoyed enormously in the very underrated Broadway musical, based on Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. But the differences between their performances are notable. Benanti sings the Harnick-Bock song very nicely and credibly, but far too filled with surety.

From the very first chord, Cook, who had a voice that might have brought down the angels to the dust of the earth, sings with such a tremulous sense of fear and insecurity that you couldn’t even imagine that this then, thin, almost emaciated singer, could have easily belted out her song to the very back levels of the balcony.

Will he like the girl he sees?

If he doesn't, will he know enough to know

That there's more to me than I may always show?

Will he like me?

She pleads, terrified by the meeting with her letter-correspondent, who just a few songs before has excitedly sung of their meeting at eight.

She pleads, furthermore, with the audience that she is a woman who might not be able to express her depths:

Will he know that there's a world of love

Waiting to warm him?

How I'm hoping that his eyes and ears

Won't misinform him

She is terrified of his judgment, so much so that she is ready to cancel her appointment. It is almost painful for the audience to hear and see that this beautiful woman, with whom Georg Nowack, the shy assistant manager of Maraczek's Parfumerie, has been corresponding, is also frightened about their evening appointment.

Yet Cook, in her singing, takes this song to new limits, the plea becoming a kind a pleading song not with her not-yet-perceived lover, but for an complete engagement with the audience, wherein her soaring lyrical arpeggios totally convince us that she is more than worthy of the unknowing Georg’s love. Benanti sings the final pleading notes of this desperate song of acceptance with a full-throated demand:

Will he like me?

He's just got to

Cook, instead, pauses, aspirates the final words, “He’s just…..got to” to create a suspense upon which depends the entire rest of the tale. Yes, he does “got to,” since she’s so impossibly loveable given her singing, but her own fears are voiced so beautifully that we, too, wonder, will Georg really see her inner beauty, really hear her lovely voice? It’s a dilemma, given her own hostility to the real workaday situation, that is expressed totally in the voice. And Cook is able, time and again, throughout this musical to convince of her inner beauty through her voice. Music, in this lovely tale of a Hungary of another time and place, is crucial. If you can’t hear Cook’s vocal message, you may not possibly comprehend the lovers’ attraction to each other. There is no question, given Cook’s singing that “He’s just got to.”

Los Angeles, August 8, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2017).

Tuesday, December 24, 2024

Sarah Ruhl | Eurydice / 2019

talking to stones

by Douglas Messerli

Sarah Ruhl Eurydice / directed by Frédérique Michel at City Garage in Santa Monica, California / the performance I attended was on Sunday, August 25, 2019

Sarah Ruhl’s 2003 play, Eurydice is a retelling of the famous Orpheus and Eurydice myth. But in the re-telling, it is the confused and quickly forgetting Eurydice who is at the center as opposed to her lover, the transcendent musician Orpheus.

Whereas, in the original Orpheus (her played by Johnny Paulino) is presented as the hero, rushing to retrieve his beloved wife who has suddenly died soon after their marriage, in this version the more important relation for Eurydice (Linsay Plake) is her dead father (Bo Roberts) whose letter from the dead is the lure that causes her death and her strange encounter with “A Nasty Interesting Man,” who turns out to be the Lord of the Underworld (Gifford Irvine).

Somewhat inexplicably neither she nor her father have yet to be washed in the waters of Lethe, which causes its bathers to completely forget the past. Her father, still fairly conscious, in fact, attempts to gently help his beloved daughter to recall her past life, the meaning of self-identity, and the role she formerly played in both his and Orpheus’ life. But this is clearly a woman, far less passive and more impassioned than the character of Green myth, who is torn between the two great loves of her earthly existence.

In her new transformation, despite conversations with her father, who attempts her re-education into being—and despite his own diminishing awareness, a condition one might almost describe as the elder’s slow fall into dementia or Alzheimer’s—Eurydice is left alone talking to the stones. Big (Marissa DuBois), Little (Emily Asher Kellis), and Loud (Brandon Reed), who generally listen but also advise her time and again, like the traditional Greek chorus, what is and is not allowed. The limits they suggest are awe-inspiring, and it is clear the despite her father’s gentle encouragement to explore the being she was, she will soon lose any power she might have remaining of her memory of her husband Orpheus’ musical talents. Besides, suggests Ruhl, she was not a very great musician, despite her lover’s extraordinary talents.

Yet it is her talking to stones that helps her realize potentialities, and her limits. If she has no being in this world of death, unlike in the Green myth, she gradually begins to perceive her past powers, and her capabilities of love both for Orpheus and her father, both of whom struggle without her existence. And, ultimately, as we know from the ancient story, Orpheus does come to retrieve her, amazingly able to convince the Lord of the Underworld to release her because of his musical talents. Even death, it is clear, retains the nostalgia for great music—which should tell us something of our own times. Music (as well as art, theater, dance, poetry, fiction, performance, and so many other arts) are the only way out of a society devoted to death, or, perhaps, even the decaying brain as it moves into death itself. Alzheimer’s patients seem to respond more positively to music than any other stimulus, except perhaps for the human voice. Ruhl is obviously playing with both of these possibilities.

Much like the her of the ancient myth, however, Orpheus is nearly all bravado. Told that he may not turn back to see if Eurydice is following him in their escape from death, he, like many a doubting male, turns back to see if she is still following him out of Hades. It means that she will disappear, this time dipped in Lethe’s murky waters, resulting also in his own death, both of her belove figures, along with Eurydice herself soon after losing their ability to comprehend the past or even the recognition of those who were important to their lives on earth, as they fall into eternal sleep.

The City Garage production, directed by the unconquerable and talented Michel and produced by Charles A. Duncombe, uses metal steel bars and gay carpeting to design their set; perhaps not a bad choice given the gymnastics that these tortured characters must endure. They are, after all, in the hands of greater gods that living forces them into calisthenics which no normal human might survive.

The acting was just fine for Ruhl’s quieter and more disturbingly troubling perceptions of the ancient story. But I was distressed by the fact that this small Bergamot Station-located theater was so sparsely attended at the Sunday matinee at which I saw it.

If Ruhl if not my favorite playwright, the production should arguably still be seen. And this company has produced some the most innovative theater to appear in Los Angeles, including significant works by Eugène Ionesco, Heiner Müller, Boris Vian, Charles I. Mee, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, María Irene Fornes, and Mac Wellman among many others. Along with Redcat, Rogue Theater, and several other smaller companies, their productions are what make Los Angeles such an exciting place for new theater.

Los Angeles, August 29, 2019

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (August 2019).

Sunday, December 22, 2024

Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones | "My Cup Runneth Over," from I Do! I Do! / 1966

my favorite musical theater songs: “my cup runneth over”

by Douglas Messerli

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgx1wyTdjJg

Composers: Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones

Singers: Mary Martin and Robert Preston, 1966 (original cast recording)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPlJd3m2K5Q

Composers: Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones

Singer: Ed Ames, 1967

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1H8_CF822c

Composers: Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones

Singer: Perry Cuomo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ3HX4DdnEA

Composers: Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones

Singers: Robert Goulet and Julie Andrews

I have to say that Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones I Do! I Do! from 1966 seemed even old-fashioned and fustian the year it appeared; but with the cast of Mary Martin and Robert Preston, under the direction of Gower Champion and the production of the masterful David Merrick what could go wrong? The musical went on to become a long-running hit, with many of its best songs such as “I Love My Wife,” wonderfully sung by Preston and, my favorite, “My Cup Runneth Over,” sung also by dozens of other interpreters such as Ed Ames, Perry Cuomo, and even Anita Bryant, making it a quite popular standard.

Jan de Hartog’s play, The Fourposter, upon which it was based, was even a nostalgic and sentimental thing back in 1951. And Schmidt and Jones, noted for their minimalist productions with highly romantic music and lyrics were probably perfect for its transformation into musical history, but hardly lightened up the marital tearjerker.

You’ll have to chalk it up to old age and the fact that Howard and I have been “married” for now 56 years that “My Cup Runneth Over” still chokes me up every time I hear it. I can hardly bear with its corny use of Elizabethan-like language such as the word “runneth”; every time I hear it I also think of the time when a cup, sliding across our glass dining table due to a bit of water underneath, brought the quip from Howard: “my glass runneth over….there and there!” So there is laughter always just underneath my flowing tears. I believe it’s the final stanza that finally does it for me:

In only a moment we both will be old

We won't even notice the world turning cold

And so, in these moments with sunlight above

My cup runneth over with love

With love

Howard and I now are old, and despite our countless difficulties, I guess we are still in love. So you’ll have to forgive this choice as simply a very personal one.

Los Angeles, September 27, 2017

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

Saturday, December 21, 2024